Making your website "sticky" for greater profits.

No, I'm not talking about what your kids do the the doorknobs, I'm referring to the overall ability of your website to attract visitors - and keep them on-site longer. Hence the term "Sticky".

All the hard work you put into website promotion and traffic generation is wasted if your visitors only stay for 90 seconds and never come back.

Make your website Sticky and your visitors will stay longer & return more often.... and that translates to more sales for you.

There are various ways that you can increase the stickiness of your website and I'll give you some ideas below, but the most effective and most important is this: Fresh, relevant content with regular updates.

Daily updates are best, but if you can't update daily you should still add content as often as possible. There are services that push content to your website, but there are drawbacks. (see below)

It's also important to remember why people came to your website in the first place -- 99.99 percent of the time they are looking for information related to your theme.

It won't matter what your website is about, either. Give your visitors articles, tips, advice and resources that relate to your theme and people will think of your website as a valuable resource.

If you don't have the time, or if you feel that you don't have the skills to write your own content, don't worry: there are plenty of free articles you can use... Just google for 'free articles' or 'free content' and take your pick.

If you do use other writer's articles, always 'Wrap' their content with your own... simply add a paragraph or two at the beginning and end of the article with your own thoughts about the topic. You can even add comments in the middle of the articles, if you make it clear that the comments are yours.

Why bother with that? Two reasons: It will reduce the search engine 'duplicate content' penalty and it also gives you a chance to impress your visitors with your own expertise.

Adding articles like that will increase your information value to your visitors, and can help with search engines too. The downside is that you are giving someone else the exposure on your website - and increasing their reputation, instead of your own.

To serve your visitors better, your best bet may be a mix of mostly original content and some reprinted content. Reprints can give a lot of content fast, but your own writing can give better content and increase your reputation as an expert.

As an expert with lots of information and resources to offer, you will get more people bookmarking your website, you'll get more visitors from the search engines, and people will tell their friends about you. If you're lucky, you may even get featured on TV news and get so many visitors that it crashes your server.

Not that we really want to annoy our hosts like that, but it would be nice to get that many visitors...

About writing your own content:

It may seem that writing articles is hard, but I believe that almost anyone can learn the few needed skills, and it's easier than you probably think. You don't need a degree or any special equipment or software beyond what you already have as a webmaster.

A full step-by-step guide for writing articles is beyond the scope of this article, but I can tell you this: The hardest part about writing articles is getting your first one done and published. After that, the more you write the easier it gets.

You can write articles for publication on other websites, but be sure to add a 'resource box' at the end. This is just a 3 or 4 line 'Bio' about you and/or your website, with a link. It's a good way to generate targeted traffic, but that is also a topic for another day.

Other things to help make your website sticky:

You can manually add a newsfeed to your website with any of an assortment of PHP and MySQL scripts that convert a regular RSS feed into HTML... this makes good spider food as well as content for your visitors.

You could add a blog to your website, visitors and search engines both love the fresh content. The only real problem with blogs is that they don't fit well with every type of website and daily updates can be a challenge.

You can offer free ebooks, coupons, contests, etc. Almost anything that is printable can help too. Coloring pages, checklists, etc.

Features that people interact with - polls, guest books, a "Guest Articles" section, chat rooms, forums, etc. - not only allow visitors to add their own fresh content, but such things also give them a reason to return at a later date to see what's new.

There is a wide variety of syndicated feeds available that give you all kinds of website content: games, daily horoscopes, Javascript news feeds, syndicated trivia or quizzes and other such things.... there are resource links below for that.

Whatever content you offer, make sure that it relates to your theme and will give helpful information to your average visitor. For instance, a website about cats would do well with a daily kitten care feed, but a horoscope feed would just be silly. (Unless someone actually makes a Cat Horoscope feed ;)

It's not all candy & roses:

The negative aspects of using third-party content feeds need to be considered.

Sometimes the source server is down, or slow, and that can slow your page-load time... people won't wait long for your page to load.

Some of them look good at first glance, but actually suck... sooner or later people will realize that and your reputation will suffer.

A few feed providers are just plain crooks: at worst they force-feed malware to your visitors, at best they simply lure people away from your website... either way you loose.

Using a newsfeed will give you fresh content daily, and that's great for your visitors. The problem is that most of them are JavaScript or VBScript and search engine spiders don't 'execute' the scripts to read the content.

There are rumors of RSS feeds being used to deliver spam or executable file downloads, and some RSS providers include ads in their feed that you probably don't want on your website.

The use of scripts (as mentioned above) to extract the HTML from newsfeeds and place that content on your webpage will place any spam or ads from the feed on your page too. If you go that route screen your source carefully.

To summarize: Assorted content feeds, HTML extracted from RSS feeds and getting your visitors to add their own content can all help make your website stickier... but nothing can replace your own fresh, relevant, keyword-rich content.

Creating and manually updating your content may be a tedious chore, but that's what's best for your visitors and the search engines -- so it's worth the effort.

To Your Success!
Tim

A few resources for sticky content:

If you want to add feeds or other types of third-party content to your website, the places listed below can get you started.

Paid content providers. Most of these are article databases, and only a few will have advertising embedded.
* ContentLogic.com - they aggregate news stories from all over the web and integrate it into your site. They also do some SEO analysis and make recommendations... but they're pretty spendy.
* Web-Content-Writers.com - this is a site for writers who are looking for work. They put you in contact with writers for free, but the writers don't work for nothing.
* WebArticlesPro.com - for a fee, they send you a batch of reprintable articles every month, you can do just about anything with them, even repackage and sell them.

Free content providers. All the free content I've ever seen had some sort of advertising embedded, even if it's only a link to the authors' website. It's also important for you to know that a few free content providers are dirtbags, so be careful about what you place on your website.
* RSSFeedReader.com - an easy way to add news feeds with a fairly wide variety of feeds ready to use. They also have a keyword feature to target feeds to your topic.
* FreeSticky.com - free and low cost feeds from a wide variety of providers.
* FindSticky.com - another aggregate resource with a listing of dozens of feed providers.
* Puzz.com - not many feeds, but good ones; with a minimum of advertising.
* FreeDictionary.com - has several "...of the day" feeds that integrate well with many website designs.

You can also google for 'free website content' and get a lot more options, including many websites that offer their own feeds or search tools. Some of those might even be better, since they aren't listed in the databases above and hundreds of other websites aren't using them.

By Tim Brown © 2006. About the author: Tim is the webmaster at http://BLT-Web.com, where webmasters can find free tools, advice, tips and other useful resources designed to help them build a successful website.

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