Maximising the Potential of your Site

While looking at the general web marketing topic, we’ve looked at various ways to attract people to view your site. In more recent articles, we’ve also looked at some on-site factors that can increase the conversion of those visitors into purchasers or clients. The reality of the internet is that a large proportion of people will not make an immediate purchase decision. It’s therefore important to look at ways to encourage people to return to your site or ways for you to follow-up their potential interest.

Sticky Content
The term "sticky" stems from the fact that you want visitors to your site to stay as long as possible. The longer that people stay on your site, the more likely that the visitor will end up purchasing something or completing any other action possible on your website. The term is also used to encompass content on a website that encourages people to return at some time in the future.

Some ideas or techniques are:

• Fresh Content - Out of date content makes a site look unprofessional and not credible. On the other hand, new or updated content gives people a reason to return. Blogs (web logs) and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) are now popular methods of providing fresh content.
• Newsletters and Articles - Offering newsletters or articles on your site can be a powerful tool to connect further with your visitor and promote yourself more in the future.
• Entertainment - Anything you can do to keep your visitors coming back to your site will provide long-term benefits. Determine what would best suit the nature of your site and your likely customer base. Some popular options include things like news, sports scores, weather reports, thought of the day, daily message, link of the day, recipes, updated pictures, polls, surveys, contests, calculators, links to other services, joke of the day etc.

Collecting Data
It’s a harsh reality of marketing on the internet that only a small proportion of people will decide to purchase your product or service on the first visit. Studies have even shown that the vast majority of people who navigate to an order form will still not complete it on the first viewing. This is why it’s critical in the online world to collect data about your visitors whenever possible so that you have a future opportunity to promote to them in the future.

You can do this in various ways. One of the most popular is setting up a simple form on your website for people to subscribe or access a free newsletter or product. Some sites even use a popup (or similar) to attempt to gain this data from visitors. Once you’ve collected information about a visitor, even if it’s just an email address, you then have the opportunity to promote yourself or your site through ethical follow-up marketing.

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