Since I started doing some research for a friend of mine I have come across a wide variety of great web sites. They sing, they dance, the make you laugh, they….you get the point. I have visited hundreds if not thousands of web sites all with their own niche to make them unique. There is one term I have learned over the many years of developing and maintaining web sites and that term is called “stickiness”. This term simply means your web site’s ability to not only attract visitors, but keep them coming back.
Take for instance the social networking website MySpace. On a scale from one to ten with ten being the highest I would consider MySpace having a rating of ten for stickiness. You can send an receive messages through MySpace, post bulletins and a slew of other tools, that I will not go into at the moment, to make people keep coming back to log in to their accounts.
That brings us to the topic of the day and that is if you had to rate the “stickiness” of your website would it be closer to one or ten? Most websites all start out at one. Over time you develop different tools, content and techniques related to what your site is all about that will make people eager to keep coming back.
If you feel you are more near the “one” end of the scale, think of some ways you can keep people coming back. For instance if you are a mortgage or lending site, add some finance calculators on their so your visitors can do some quick calculations. If you run a landscaping business offer daily tips on how a consumer can maintain their lawn properly. For us we are all about keeping business owners motivated so we post a different motivational quote each day.
I have seen other websites offer a “poll of the day” or a “survey of the day” and so on. The list is endless. Whatever it is you choose should be related to what your website is about. If you sell baseball cards it wouldn’t make much sense to do a daily poll about politics now would it? Probably not.
It does not even need to be polls, surveys, quotes or questions. I have seen some websites have stickiness just by pure content. They change the content on a daily sometimes hourly basis. People keep coming back to read what is on there.
You will need to find out what your “stickiness” will be. Sit down and write up what your website is all about, what you want to accomplish with it and so on. Once you have that written down, now write a list of ten things that you feel people would keep coming back to see over and over again. Remember studies have shown that people need to be exposed to something seven times before they make a purchase or sign up for it. Put your plan in place to keep those same visitors coming back over and over.
About the Author:
Mr. Tucker is the Associate Director of http://www.Indocquent.com, an online advertising and social network medium where you can promote your business, products or services without pay-per-click prices or auction fees.
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