Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

Welcome to the first of the guest contributions for this month. Over the next few weeks you will see articles from many different authors here at Entrepreneur’s Journey. Enjoy! - Yaro

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By Adnan from Blogtrepreneur.com

When Yaro asked me to fill in and write an article, I decided that I should try and answer a question that will in effect make or break an online company -

How Can I Keep Visitors Coming Back To My Site For More?

Hopefully this article should apply to all Internet website owners, from bloggers to e-commerce store masters. Visitors, whether they be unique (first time) or repeat, are essential to a site’s well-being and growth over a period of time. By having a constant flow of visitors, you are enabling more pageviews and so more revenue if you are selling your own products or if you have advertising, and you are more likely to build a solid and sharing community if you own a forum or blog.

There are a few ways in which you can turn more unique visitors into returning visitors. Here are some ideas -

• One of the first things a person sees when they enter your homepage is your logo and branding. This is why many people spend a lot of time and money on logos, due to first impressions from a visitor’s perspective. By having a clean, professional font, or a fun and wacky picture, you are attempting to create a sense of trust between the visitor and yourself. This trust is key in making the visitor feel more at home and more likely to return to your site.
• Tied in with this is the use of personal pronouns (for example “you” or “we”). By engaging the reader in your webpage, you are being more personal and thus are creating a bond that will hopefully pull in more readers. If you are a blogger, creating a sense of personality can help you to increase your readership.
• Customer service is extremely important in tempting a reader to revisit your site. When someone emails you, you must always be polite and courteous, the same as in a phone call. Go out of your way in order to help your visitor feel comfortable with your company, whether you are selling a product or not.
• Make sure on every page in your site there is a noticeable contact button or link so that readers can get in touch with you if there is a problem or simply if they have any worries or queries.

Happy customers are more likely to refer others through word of mouth, and it is this viral marketing which will help more people to arrive at your site, and which will inevitably keep people coming back for more. However, remember that all marketing is not good marketing. Once one user has had a bad experience, poor reviews can become viral on the Internet and can ruin your business. Make sure this does not happen through your attitude and your business ethic.

By holding certain promotions, you may also find your number of returning visitors increase dramatically. Some examples of this could include holding competitions, where a user submits their contact information in return for a prize. Obviously, once you have obtained this information it would be immoral to use this for spamming and the like, so make sure you also have stringent policies against this. Once you have obtained email addresses use this wealth of information to form a newsletter, where every week you email your list advertising a certain product or service. This will help users to keep coming back to your site for more products or information.

Other promotions could include opening a forum or blog on your site. People always love to read fresh and new content, so make sure there are always new articles and you may find the number of members or comments increasing. Forums are also very good for advertising revenue as they tend to have a very high amount of pageviews as users keep refreshing the pages to see if anyone has commented on their threads or posted a reply.

Even if you try out just a few of these ideas it may be enough to convince your visitors to come back for more. With this can come more revenue and a greater online community which in effect, is the dream of any aspiring business owner or entrepreneur!

Adnan
www.blogtrepreneur.com