Though bounce rates vary wildly based on industry and type of site, news and media sites typically have a bounce rate well north of 50%. This means that those site, which include many bloggers, are watching as over half of their visitors read one page and leave, likely never to return.

Turning one-time visitors in to regular readers and possible customers is a tricky but important art for all websites. It’s crucial for growing a site’s traffic and growing its readership. But convincing hit-and-run visitors to come back is no easy task, especially considering many will visit dozens of sites in a single day and will, at the most, only remember a few.

So how can you get drive-by visitors to come back? Here are five techniques that might make your site a little bit more sticky.

1. Provide Fresh, High-Quality Content

The best thing to keep visitors coming back for more is a regularly updated site that has relevant, high-quality and interesting content that people want to read. Whether it’s niche content only relevant to a small group or something with a much broader appeal, the goal is to find something your target audience wants to read and provide it regularly, ideally multiple times per week.

Along these lines, it’s often best to include posts that are part of a series that pushes someone who is interested to come back sometime in the future.

2. Be Where They Are

Make it easy for people to follow your site by being wherever they are. Offer RSS subscriptions, a Twitter feed, a Facebook page and email newsletter along with anything else that might be relevant. People are much more likely to subscribe if they don’t have to go out of their way and they are more likely to read your work if it’s in a place they already visit..

3. Reward Returning Readers

Offer content that is exclusive to your email newsletter, RSS feed or Facebook pages. Make this content valuable, desirable and free, but only to those who follow your site and keep up with its updates. Generally, people want access to anything that is “exclusive”, especially if they feel it might give them an advantage over competitors.

4. Encourage Reader Participation

Readers are more likely to return to a site they are invested in. Encourage readers to post your site either through guest blogging, comments, a forum or some combination thereof. Once readers have left their mark on your site, they are less likely to forget or ignore your site.

However, even if you don’t want readers posting to your site, you can ask for ideas and suggestions from readers and reward them for the ideas that you accept. This can make them feel like they have a voice in the site, making them much more likely to return.

5. Increase Your Exposure

Even if you do everything right, most of your visitors will likely not come back a second time. The reason is, people rarely remember anything after a first exposure and it takes multiple iterations for something to stick.

As such, focus on getting your site out there. Activities such as linkbuilding, advertising and SEO can get your site in front of your target repeatedly, making it so that they remember and come back repeatedly.

Conclusions

Realistically, you can’t make your site sticky for every single visitor and a good number will always leave and never come back. But if you can capture even a smaller percentage more of those new visitors, it can have a tremendous impact on your site’s growth as the effect snowballs.

This is why it’s important not to focus on perfection, but rather, focus on improvement. Fortunately, or unfortunately, doing better is a goal every webmaster can strive for every day.

Related articles

• What Is High, Normal And Low Bounce Rates? (dailyblogtips.com)
• How Colors can Influence Readers Actions and Make Us More Money (shoutmeloud.com)
• How To Make Your Visitors Spend More Time In Your Blog (iblogzone.com)
• Expanding StumbleUpon Network (dragonblogger.com)

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Improve Your Bounce Rate: 5 Ways to Get Visitors to Come Back is a post from Blazing Minds Copyright 2008-2011. Please link back when using this source material.

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