We all have a short attention span & precious little time. On the Internet we have millions of websites to choose from & once we arrive on a site, it’s as easy as one button click to jump to another site far far away.
No matter what your site’s purpose, you need loyal eyeballs. Capturing & keeping them means making them so happy nothing can steal them away.
To this day many small business sites are nothing more than an online brochure. Those businesses wanting to get online in a hurry, simply transform their printed brochure into a HTML document & place it on the web.
But if you’re reusing words or pictures from another source, and not adding considerable value by offering them online, then they have no real value on your site. If the web doesn’t make it easier or faster, or offer something different from what is in your brochure, then why would someone make the effort to go to the website?
Make it easy to make contact
There’s nothing worse than arriving on a site & not being able to find any contact details. Let your visitors choose how they want to make contact. Provide your phone & fax number, postal & email address and a fill-in enquiry form.
News / Newsletters / Articles
Immediate, convenient access to the latest news.
If you have real news that people care about, communicate it on your site. If you do, they will come. But getting your news live quickly enough to make the web faster than traditional distribution, means having a content management process in place that makes this a reality.
Another way you can involve your readers on a regular basis is to offer a newsletter. Write a regular article on themes related to your site & email it to your database to keep in contact. Eg. If your website represents your bicycle shop, your newsletter could contain cycling articles.
Online Forum
You can keep people coming back to your site by using a bulletin board or forum. The beauty of a forum is that your visitors create your content. However, in order for this to work you must have enough traffic. One way to encourage participation is to announce, on your site & in your newsletter, a specific period when there’ll be discussion on a given topic. This is a good way to tie together your enews & forum to sustain interest in your site.
Customer Service
Enabling customer service online is perhaps the single most effective way to making your site valuable. And the 24x7 nature of the web makes it possible. The challenge is to utilise technology to make your online customer service better than your phone or offline service. Personalisation, quick responses, verification & database-driven problem solving are all examples that can be used on your site to improve service.
Blog or Q& A Column
Finally, here is another idea on how to draw visitors into the site. You're an expert on something, that's why you have your website! Start a question & answers column on the site, let your visitors send in their questions and you or your team of experts can give the answers. Award a prize to the person who sends in the best question of the month. It will help you to generate some useful and new content for your site and also let you know what your visitors are thinking.
This article was provided by Melissa Norfolk Technology Presentations. Melissa is a professional speaker who speaks to business and community groups on how to use the internet effectively both for searching and also marketing a business online
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