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Visitor Retention Strategies

1. Message Boards

Message boards are the easiest visitor retention method to set up. In theory with message boards the content is created by a site's visitor's without any effort on the site's part at all. That is in theory, in practice a site will have to moderate its forums or risk potential illegal or inappropriate things being said that reflect poorly on the site as a whole. Message boards have a few major draw backs as well. *Read More

2. Publishing User Submitted Content

Publishing articles by choice writers can provide the writers with an outlet to reach those interested in their business interests without expending money on advertising. By having them write an article for your site you give them name recognition in exchange for content that your visitors want. That is one way of handling user submitted content. Another method would be posting user reviews or open ended questions and publishing the best visitor responses. The recognition and chance to be seen by lots of people can serve to keep people actively contributing content to your site and giving your site a bit more content that may or may not be of much value. It keeps people sticking around though as people like to win contests of sorts even if the prize is just name recognition. When using user submitted content in conjunction with real prizes one can create a site that a select group of people will spend large amounts of time at. This is visitor retention in action. Publishing user content is different than just giving people a message board to post at as the site itself is setting the style and topic of the responses and in theory only presenting the best material to its visitors.

3. Free Email

Free email in the past was a popular thing that lots of people needed and sought out. But now with all of the multitudes of hotmail clones free email has become a commodity like thing. While it can brand a site and have lots of people visit a given site every day to check email the value of their visits vs the expense of the free email service provided is seldom in balance. This coupled with the fact that most people who wanted free email accounts have already signed up with a free account from one of the bigger sites like Yahoo, or Hotmail makes the fact that a given site may offer free email service a rather minor point to most people. Free email can brand your site everytime one of your visitors sends mail as their recipients will see your domain and a message you may choose to include at the bottom of the message. This might sound like nice cheap, viral marketing but in reality free email is also expensive on many levels. First free email service will require a lot of disk space as each account might need 5 or 10 megs each. Second free email requires a lot of CPU power as sending and sorting email is not the same as just sending out plain html files. Hotmail alone uses 5,000 servers to provide email service. Thirdly free email has the risks of associating your site with spam, unsolicited commercial email, and even illegal materials. This is because with free email anyone could send anything via your free email and it all reflects on your company and perhaps even could result in legal or civil penalities.

4. Start Pages, Horoscopes, and Free Classifeds, and Other Community Features

Along with free email, start pages are also a popular way of retaining visitors. If you can't afford to provide free email for them, why not just figure out a way to make your site the first they visit every time they visit the web? This might sound nice in theory but difficult to achieve in practice. A start page could allow a site visitor to store their favorite sites and search engines, along with receive horoscope, weather, stock quotes, or sports scores, or news relating to your site's topic. A script could feed in the data for weather, stock quotes, horoscopes, and sports scores so a site doesen't have to do anything to maintain this data. Data feeds for this sort of thing can be costly though as can the software to do it. And in the end with a start page the visitor is busy trying to do something that is perhaps part of their routine so untargetted ads which are what this type of traffic can get will be very ineffective and be a very poor revenue generator. And of course there certainly are better start pages out there at the major portals like Yahoo than some small site can muster in an attempt to keep visitors on their site longer. Free classified ads or auctions relating to your sites topics can also keep people around longer and serve as a nice place to seed with ads for merchandise a site itself sells. Scripts for auctions are easy to get but a site will not become ebay merely by having a script. But if an industry is very small and niche oriented then it is possible that a site other than ebay could become the "dominant" auction player on the topic online even if the rewards are just a sense of pride for the site itself. A site could also offer search features for their site if they wish or a directory via free usage of the Open Directory Project Data. This could cause some people to search the internet from your site rather than a popular search engine but this is very unlikely. Small sites offering search the web features mainly aim to do this to make the site look better or to try to make money off of pay per click search ads which can be easily incorporated.

5. Email Newsletters

An email newsletter can serve several purposes for a site. It can be used to to inform people of new content on your site that they could then go and see. It can be used as a stand alone medium to provide news about your sites topic or niche. It can be used in an interactive fashion to allow your site visitors to have a mailing list that they can send and receive messages to with the webmaster acting merely as a moderator. Regardless of how a newsletter is used it can lead people to ads either on your site or in your newsletter. People on a site's mailing list are generally more interested in a site's topic than those not on a mailing list so these people are usually more responsive to the types of ads or merchandise that you can secure for your site. Email newsletters can allow a site to lock in traffic much as offline print media does with subscriptions. Free email newsletters that exist as an extension of a website are not that hard to build up audiences for if you are willing to create relevant content. Down the road that large audience could prove very valuable and make the content on your site all the more valuable since you are able to use email to keep in contact with those most interested in your site's theme.

6. Quizes and Interactive Content

By providing interactive type content a site can keep visitors from leaving the site for a longer period of time. Games, and quizes encourage people to test their skills and many people will stick around and do them. As people stick around longer for games, and quizes and such their value to a content oriented site diminishes. People that stick around on sites longer view more pages and are less likely to click on ads. Games on a site may continue to run in a way that does not allow new ads to appear short of the ads self refreshing which many adnetworks do not allow. These drives down their value to advertisers and adnetworks. If you look at a site section like Yahoo Games you can see in practice people spending an hour or more playing chess using up server resources without ever responding to a single ad. The entire exercize just costs money to a site and if it is not viewed as an extra to attract people to your main content pages the effort may cost a site money and produce little gain. One does not want to have to resort to some form of uncapped popup but many interactive themed sites might have to in order to extract value from a site if quizes and interactive stuff are a large basis of a sites page view source.

7. Prizes

By having contests with prizes for people that do certain actions on your site you can encourage people to stay on your site longer and return more often. While this is true, incentivizing your visitors to be on your site may not be that economical for some types of sites at certain traffic levels. A site could give prizes for people who post so many messages in a message board, contribute a certain amount of pages of material, or just give them out to random site visitors. The chance of a prize can serve to get people to a site and keep them there. Having traffic based on prizes and contests also could possibly serve to lower the perceived value of your visitors to advertisers which needs to be kept in mind. One could also just give out honors or recognition without a prize to valuable site contributers and this too could serve as a prize.

8. News and Content Updates

Providing frequent updated content and news on your sites topic can serve to help retain some elements of your more active visitors. While this is true, running a "news" site that requires constant work to keep ones audience is a hard thing to do indeed and might not be worth the effort when compared to running more of an "archive" oriented site. But by having a page that gives information about updates to your site you can encourage people to return more often to see what a site's webmaster has been working.