Getting people to stay at your site
Keeping people coming back and getting them to stay. That’s the name of the game when it comes to developing profitable websites. First thing you need to start out with is content. Content, content, content. Getting a good Google search ranking is all about content. It needs to be updated regularly and there needs to be a lot of it. Second is links. The page rank from most search engines and web directories is also based on the amount of quality links from other sites. No bogus spamming links, genuine links from similar content sites.
Starting out with content you’ll need to write clearly and you need to write prolifically. Focus on a niche and don’t worry about your writing at first. It should be good but don’t over analyze. Quality writing will come with practice. The other thing you need to do is to get out there and promote your site. You can start with the directories and then venture to similar sites. See if they’ll link exchange with you. Just let people know you’re here. I have been employing a couple different methods of my own which I explain, with results in my increasing traffic within the first two weeks post.
Once you’ve got a good start on those two things you should move on to creating a good looking site. What is a good looking site? Well, an example of a bad site is those that you stay on for only a second. When you reached it your brain was probably saying, “you won’t find what you need here, move on.” So you listened, without even skipping a beat. Those are the sites that don’t look good. The ones that you don’t even wait to see what the content is. The next question is how do you create a site that people stick around to see the content? Well, tons of people have studied this and rightly so.
Luckily for us many people share their research free and post them all over the internet. Before visiting these though I suggest paying attention to the sites you go to often. I sometimes wonder to myself such as, why do I go to gizmodo.com over engadget.com. The navigation, the color, the text, the spacing, look at it all and make note of it.
Aside from just paying attention to good sites you should visit sites that inform you of the techniques that have worked for them. Below I listed some sites I have used to help me develop my site. They range from ideas on site layout to tools for color matching. Try them out and find your own. There’s a bunch out there.
One Minute Designer - The whole website is really good, efuse, but I found the one minute design article to be the most helpful. It’s a quick primer to getting you thinking in the right direction of keeping traffic surfing your site. I would start with this article if I were you.
7 ways to keep customers coming back - This is an article by Microsoft about keeping your customers coming back. Little tricks you can use to keep people involved with you site. The list is short and sweet but outlines some good points. One thing I have employed is a newsletter. Not many people have joined yet but as my traffic grows a newsletter will be a good way to keep forgetful surfers coming back.
Color Schemer Online - color schemer online is the free web based version of the Color Schemer software. This company has made the color wheel quick and easy to use. If you go to the online version you will be able to pick one of the standard 256 colors and then the software chooses 16 colors that match it the best. This can be used to make your website color friendly. I am currently going through some color changes myself to make things a bit easier on the eyes. Browsing around I have notice that the color factor is a big portion of whether I will stay or not.
I would also like to mention that you should try out as many text possibilities as possible. There are some that work and some that don’t. Also use the line-spacing: and text-spacing: attributes within your CSS style sheets (or your in line styles). Having good spacing makes a world of difference towards the readability of your site.
Good luck, pay attention, and try, try, try as much as you can.
Pingback from Flee the Cube»Blog Archive » Google AdSense is up and running
Time: January 11, 2006, 9:42 am
[...] Finally! I’ve had this blog up for almost three months, but was still hesitating to put any kind of monetization feature on it. Partly, it was because I didn’t know how putting up ads would affect my search rankings, and I suspected the effect would be negative. Nonsense, even if the effect was negative, it has to be minor. Partly, it was because I hadn’t set apart a block of time for signing up, setting up, and getting it to work with Wordpress. This was surprisingly quick and easy. But mostly, it was because of my low traffic numbers. Even with AdSense up I’m sure it will be a while before I see any real income from it. The real task at hand, as Erik points out, is building a decent amount of traffic. Everything else follows from there. The initial push to achieve this is through networking and search engine traffic. [...]