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Getting Repeat Visitors

Once you have your site up and are receiving visitors from both advertising and search engine hits, it is important that you provide the features that will keep your site in the minds of visitors, and keep them coming back. The three most influential factors in this quest are:

Site Content
Site Personalization
Site Entertainment

So let's examine these individually.

Site Content

Without question, the most important factor in getting repeat visitors, and word-of-mouth referrals, is the content of your site. Visitors to your web site are coming there in response to some stimulus- an ad, a link given them as a result of a search, or something similar. It is likely they are looking for something specific, and are coming to your site with the expectation that you will likely offer them something of value. And you better deliver! Content must be relevant to the product or service you are offering over the web. If you sell art, you need to have a gallery of your work so people may determine if your art is in line with what they want. If you sell a product, you need complete descriptions of that product; a service, complete information on what you will do for them and how the process works. Testimonials help as well. The most important rule in developing content for your site is to Think like the visitor who is coming to your site is thinking. What questions might they have and want answered? What do you need to have available on your site so that the decision to buy your product or service is the easiest choice for them- easier that bothering to check other sites? If you get the content right, you'll have great success from your site.

Site Personalization

Many sites offer a very wide variety of information mixes. Not all of this information is relevant or even of interest to every visitor to the site. Many sports sites, for instance, allow you to personalize, or customize the site, by asking you to register your preferences. If you don't register, when you come to the site, you get a mix of football, figure skating, golf, horse racing, basketball and hockey news and scores. But if you register your preferences, and let that site know your only interests are golf and football, then every subsequent time you visit that site, the only information displayed on the very first page you come to will be golf and football news and scores, saving you the need to dig through often complex menu- driven navigation systems. This also works on business sites to allow certain clients to be automatically identified as, say, buyers of a particular product in your line, and their page gives them immediate access to their order history, account status, and other pertinent data, without having to log in and click through menus every time. It can even speed the process of automatic inventory tracking and replenishment when combined with the custom CGI applications that Xanatos can develop for you!

Site Entertainment

Many years ago, when I was first teaching myself JavaScript, I developed a simple "Play4 Lottery Number Generator" that just generated a four digit random number that people could, if they so desired, use to generate numbers to play on their local state lottery games. I placed it up on my site to demonstrate one aspect of JavaScript, and within six months, it became my top-hitting page, with over 100 hits per day. So I quickly redesigned the page to include my full advertising material and reloaded it. I got many inquiries about my site work following that change!

I also designed a contest in which people (maybe even you!) can win a $500.00 credit from Xanatos good toward any new site contract. That's a significant savings if you're seriously looking for a web site. The key marketing strategy in this contest is that the 10 questions are all about the content of this site. If someone wants the credit, they have to look through the site to find the answers, and in so doing, I am able to make people aware of several outstanding features of Xanatos Enterprises high-quality work.

I have many other games, contests and CGI applications, such as the XanaVote user poll, which allows visitors to vote their opinion on anything, from current events to web site preferences, and then view the cumulative totals from all voting respondants. People often will check back at the end of the polling to view the totals of the vote. This type of polling system can be found on a variety of web sites, from CNN.com to local FM radio stations, because it offers entertainment, participation, and information.

The things all these gimmicks have in common is that they can all be customized to match your specific site needs, and they all provide some form of potentially useful entertainment to your visitors, which results in some increase in return visits and word-of-mouth advertising. It is important that the match of entertainment gimmick and site content be a good one. A lottery number generator is certainly inappropriate on a site where problem gamblers may go to seek help, but if your store has a lottery terminal, it would tie in nicely. Even though Xanatos has nothing to do with the lottery (I don't even play!), the page is still an excellent draw for new visitors to the site.

In Conclusion...

Without good content, no amount of personalization or games can get your target audience making repeat visits. With good content, personalization and entertainment can make a good site visit into an excellent site visit, and a memorable and appreciated experience that will get your users coming back. We will help you develop your content, and we will build in any appropriate levels of user customization/personalization and entertainment that fit your target demographic. Call us today to learn more about what we can do for your particular application.