Improve your visitor retention

These days web masters seems scared to share links, everyone is giving search engine traffic the hairy eye ball. Truth is if your not Google reliant every visitor is golden and even though I have hammered on this point before, you need to catch them, suck them in and make them stick.

Getting by without SE traffic is entirely possible but it involves adapting the way we approach a website. The traditional school of thought is that you want a visitor, a click, a sale, an impression you draw people to a website and encourage them to perform an action. To really survive without the big G we need to begin asking our visitors for something different. We need approval, we need interaction and we need them to invite us into their lives in however small of a way. I need an invite into your mail box, I need an impression of your Facebook feed and I require a mention on your twitter feed.

Nearly anyone who is successful online has a news letter and if you have a little experience you have your confirmation message, welcome message and first three follow ups all planned out ahead of time. The real problem is though, everyone has a news letter if I clicked on every signup bar I would be receiving three thousand news letters a day and this is fast becoming a problem. Especially for the small operator or the new comer both have trouble putting together scintillating content for numerous reasons. So how does one begin to work around the reality that unless you happen to be Rand Fishkin or Viper Chill you just might not have that mojo that attracts a 50k + mailing list?

A lot of people make the mistake of investing in a sign on incentive, a great e-book that you can download after your sign up. The problem is I can unsubscribe anytime and likely will if your news letter is not appealing to me on an on going basis. Unsubscribing is easy and so is blocking or relegating a sender to spam or trash. So in reality even a huge mailing list may have a useless interaction ratio.

So perhaps it is time to look at a few less obvious ways of ensuring our news flashes keep their audience.

• Offer a service, if your market is car parts go and scour ebay for 20 great bargains and insert into news letter. If your sending me content I can use, your winning me over.
• Create your own bargains, bargains are hard as usually you need a strong subscriber base to attract great prices but you need a great bargain to attract a strong list. Ways one could create their own bargains are many fold, invest in stock and sell it at cost or loss if need be. Take out an reseller hosting account and offer $1 a month hosting, you need 30 people to take it to break even and it will be a pain. Go get an account with Animoto and offer to make videos for a $1 or free....
  By now I am sure the point is getting across its going to be painful, however these days you need cream to float to the top
• If your news letter is getting a low % of views and no interaction try a new method of delivery, a link, image and call to action sending people to read it on Facebook might be want your audience wants.

So basically stop trying to monetize and begin thinking about popularising!


Make some friends and get a following.
I am big on Facebook lately I think its fast becoming an easy platform to market from and beginning to add some search engine value. There is so much more one can do with a Facebook page. Want to convert news letter signups like crazy, stick a competition on Facebook and capture details using form stack. One can also use form stack to control what guests vs fans like, such a robust Facebook tool I am surprised more people do not use it.
Make sure people can SHARE your posts, items, images the works. Facebook sharing is super targeted traffic waiting to happen if I shared it with some one its because I know they will like it.
Interact like mad with Facebook groups and people on Facebook, the brand mentions won't hurt and the discussion can be useful for visitor conversion and SEO.
There is always more to add how are you retaining visitors?