How can you turn visitors into returning visitors?
Every new blog owner is trying to attract as many people on his site, by promoting it in as many ways as possible. But, when we’re talking about traffic, the most important aspect to achieve is to make people come back. It will do you no good in having thousands of uniques that only come once and will never return afterwards. That’s why you should try turning them into returning visitors. And here are a couple of tips on how you can do this…
We’re not going to talk about the importance of returning visitors, as it is obvious: you get dedicated readers that will come back again and again, thus growing your traffic and generating extra income. But how can you turn regular visitors into returning visitors
Content is king
Another thing you should take into consideration is the fact that most visitors will only read the beginning of your post (or even just the title), that’s why is important to make them eloquent, capable of catching someones attention in just a couple of seconds.
Also, make sure you update your content regularly, cause returning readers want to find new articles every time they visit. That’s why i suggest updating your blog daily. And remember, one good post per day will is way better than a dozen of crappy ones. It’s not about the quantity, it’s about the quality.
Attract them from the first moment
Your blog will be judged by most of your visitors by the first impression it makes. A high loading time, bad and crowded design or lots and lots of ads will kill cut you little site right from its roots. You might notice big sites that have some of this faults and also lots of readers. Yeah, but they already have the community and the name, they afford to do it. When you’re small, remember: Keep your blog as simple, clean and accessible as possible!
Most of the new readers on a blog check out the "About us" page. That’s why it has to be well written and attractive. If they like you, people will also like your blog 
Pick an easy to remember domain name
It’s important to pick a good domain name, that’s a fact. There are many criteria on picking it, but one of them is its simplicity. In order to make people remember your site’s name, you must pick it short (if possible) and clear. I don’t recommend using special characters, like "-" or "_", as they might be confusing. If you manage to pick the right domain name for your niche, your visitors will remember it an come back directly from time to time.
RSS, Newsletter and Bookmarking services
Besides picking an easy to remember domain name, you should also provide some Bookmarking services. There’s a great plugin for Wordpress that ads a bookmark bar at the end of each article, called Sociable. As you can see, i use it and you should give it a try also.
On the other hand, it’s important for a blog/site to have RSS and Newsletter services. The RSS feed allows your users to read your content via their RSS readers and the newsletter sends a mail with your latest content to your subscribers. Thus, they’ll always remember your site, and come back to read it.
Interactivity and contests
A good way to make people come back is to make them feel important. How? By showing them you care. When someone comments on your blog, make sure you right back. Many people like to come back and check for answers on the blogs they commented before, and if they find answers they might be tempted to come back again or subscribe to that site. There are other ways to attract interactivity but we’re going to talk about them in a future article.
Contests are another great way to turn visitors into returning ones. People like free stuff. It doesn’t have to be expensive, it just has to be attractive. Some of the contest ideas i used on my blogs are:
- ask people to guess what’s shown in a picture (the most successful)
- ask people to subscribe and then have a draw for the winner
- ask people to write a good post for you in order to win a prize
- if you have other ideas please share them with us and I’ll add them to the list
Conclusion – The numbers
If you manage to mark all these tips above, you should get a pretty decent percentage of returning visitors. Being around 12-20% might be your goal. If you manage to pass the 20% margin then you’re doing great. If you’re bellow, don’t worry. Just read the tips and you’ll do better.
This blog has a return rate of 11% in the last month (actually, it was its first month 
). It’s OK from my point of view, considering i got most of my traffic from Stumbleupon, Digg and Reddit, and it is known that these visitors are a lot harder to retain than targeted ones. But I’m planing on improving…
If your site ranks high in the SERPs for several important keywords, it is more likely to get return visitors to it. Usually, people use the search engines to find websites related to what they are looking for and usually, they do it on a regular basis. High rankings in the SERPs will surely get you more return visitors.
Another way of getting return visitors is to make your site ready by adding RSS subscription feed buttons and other social bookmarking icons, like it is already done above on this blog, and also a newsletter sign up form on the site. Then submitting your site to social bookmark sites to get hundreds and thousands of users to the site. It is very likely that a good % of these visitors will subscribe or sign up to the blog and will become regular readers.
Mar 8th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
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