A Visit Isn’t REALLY a Visit if Your Company Leaves on the Porch: 5 Steps to Increasing Repeat Visitors to Your Website

What good is your website traffic if your visitors are leaving at the home page? Bah! You don’t want visitors ON your site, you want ‘em IN it. Use this painless 5-step process for getting visitors past "the porch" — into your site, and coming back.

1. Establish your website’s main goal.

Your website can have several different goals, so long as you don’t try to achieve each of them at once.

For instance, say you want your site to attract more readers to your ezine, secure new customers for your products, and attract repeat visitors. Pick ONE of those goals to focus on the most , and make the other two secondary.

Tip: If you’re relatively new to designing effective websites, start by focusing on one goal ONLY, and forget the others until the next go round. [For help designing an effective site focused on primary and secondary goals, see That Left-Hand Side : 6 Foundational Steps to Increasing Your Website’s Selling Power (1 of 2).]

2. Use home page lead-ins to content-laden pages.

If your primary goal is, say, to secure buyers, you can lead visitors into that product in several ways.

Here’s an example:

Write an article on the general subject matter of your product, with an eye-catching title (read: "headline") for the article. Then create a page for it on your website. On your home page, post the first few sentences of the article with a link to read the rest of it on its own page. Easy to do with a blog, the way it’s set up — teasers go on the front page with links to "read more". As you’ve noticed. ;)

Anyway, taking this idea a step further to massively increased effectiveness , you could…

…leave your article excerpt hanging in mid-sentence to entice your readers to click deeper into your site to read the article

A super-simple, 10-second change to a standard marketing technique. But boy does it increase response in droves. Here’s an example of an effective article excerpt "lead-in":

In only one day , I had over 400 new visitors clamoring their way into my website. I didn’t use search engines, blogging, free giveaways, ezine advertising, (or spam!), and it didn’t cost me anything — not one thin dime. So how did I do it? What was the FREE …

[ Click here now to read the rest of this article. ]

If you’ve targeted your lead-in to attract your target audience who you know would be interested in your article’s subject matter, it’s a no-brainer. Who WOULDN’T want to find out what that author is harping on about?

3. Change your home page content and/or layout often.

Nearly every time I redesign or add new content to my informational sites, I see an increase in activity. Whether the increase is in sales, page views, etc. corresponds directly with exactly what change I’ve made to the site.

Tip: Of course don’t change your website’s look and feel too drastically, or you’ll keep leaving repeat visitors frustrated when they have to "re-learn" how to get around. Maybe a new graphic that tells them to click to a new section of the site, a new promotion, etc. Having something ever-changing is an easy, yet effective way to keep people interested.

One painfully easy way to do this is to set up a content rotator on your home page to rotate, well, any type of content you like. Article teasers, your company’s main promotions, user "spotlight" profiles if you have a social networking site, crazy pictures of you doing something random — whatever.

Think about what would be most effective for your audience. Then rotate that .

You can have a content rotator installed on your website for a very low a la carte price over at Chump Change Web Design . And of course, the content will be loaded for you and rotator placed pleasingly in the prime location of your choice. ;) See what’s available here .

If you’re "refreshing" your design manually, doing so every several months to one year may be acceptable. Test to see what frequency works best for your particular audience. If you’re updating content on the other hand, (did I just say "if"!?), you never can do THAT too much. Your only limitation is how often you have time to add new content to your site. But again, using a content rotator makes it easier to manage — just load the content beforehand, and it will change itself on a preset schedule.

4. Don’t be a bore.

When thinking of new ways to lure visitors into your site, the possibilities are endless.

For instance, one popular website (who has since changed their technique, so I won’t link to it…) used to use a list of home page teasers as if they were leading to main sections of the site (like Articles, News, etc.). In actuality, the teasers led only to individual articles.

But no matter — it still worked to get people intrigued.

When visitors clicked on the teaser links, wanting to learn more about the topic the article covered, they’d of course usually end up reading (or at least skimming) it, all the while subconsciously starting to establish the author as an expert in her industry. And perhaps then seeking out even more of her articles to read.

Jackpot.

What easier way to get visitors involved in your website content than creative teasers? Blogs, again, are an awesome example of just how well this can work.

5. Eliminate clutter and distractions on the home page.

Uck. How many times have you gone to a website that sounded interesting … but that ended up being a hideous conglomeration of disorganized links, cramped advertisements, flashing things, and loud colors your eyes STILL see long after you’re gone from the page?

:-/ What a way to send your visitors hightailing it.

Giving visitors too many options usually means they’re leaving on the front page when they can’t make a decision — and when nothing looks attractive enough to get them to stick around.

In contrast … look at RevenueTools.com .

The owner has since turned his site into a blog only, but the fantastic thing about this guy — Mark Idzik, an old colleague of mine — is that he’s ALWAYS kept things simple, clean … and effectively designed. I remember when his website was a nice, soothing light blue and white, using just a little red for emphasis (and sparingly).

Even back in the early 2000’s when Web marketers were simply determined to cram as much CRAP onto their websites as bandwidth allowed, Mark’s site always, always contained absolutely no clutter , with text and graphics that were credibility enhancing and engaging . Not frightening.

There has never, to my knowledge, been any overuse of formatting (i.e., bold/underline) at all, and the design has always been very clean and professional, guiding you comfortably down the page, every single time I’ve checked it over all these years…

As it does now . Of course.

Newsflash: Design doesn’t typically have to be fancy or awe-inspiring to get the job done. Thank goodness, right? ;)

Mark’s simple, clean site presents a solid example of design that offers up an inviting, comfortable, trust-inducing atmosphere for increased visitor retention.

Simplicity is a good thing.

:~)

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 Respected Business & Marketing author H.T. Major has nearly a decade of collective experience fine-tuning the art of creating effective, efficient business websites that SELL, and boosting the conversion of existing sites. Now she offers supremely affordable website, photo, & business design services that are not only about creating "pretty pictures", but about creating RESULTS: visit ChumpChangeWebDesign.com.

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