5 Ways to Promote Your Site and Keep Customers Coming Back

Any webmaster can tell you a dozen ways to get more traffic for your website. A quick search over at Google brings back millions of websites full of tips on gaining increased levels of website traffic. Unfortunately, having millions of people visiting a website does not instantly bring financial success. Website traffic needs to be targeted to the site content and products; unless traffic is highly targeted it is unlikely to convert at a decent ratio. So are there any ways to both promote a website and keep those valuable customers coming back time and time again? Of course there are, check out these five ideas below.

Content is king

Make sure that your website content is interesting and fits your target customers perfectly. If you sell apples there is no point posting website content about oranges. If you are writing a page that is intended to sell a product do not be afraid of using the services of a professional copywriter, good copy can pay back its cost very quickly as it sells the product so much more effectively.

Money is in the list

Always capture at least the email address of your visitors. This allows you to build a mailing list to be used to promote products and services via an autoresponder service. Most internet marketers believe that a 10% conversion ratio is an acceptable level for an autoresponder campaign, so in business terms this would mean 10% of the people on your mailing list would purchase the product you are promoting via email. Once again, use the services of a professional copywriter if you are not fully skilled in writing sales focused copy. Please note that in most countries it is illegal to operate a single opt-in list and a double opt-in system must be used. This means a confirmation email must be sent to a new subscriber asking them if they wish to be added to the list.

Blog for business

It can sometimes be hard finding ways to post relevant content to an ecommerce site. One of the best ways to get around this lack of flexibility with the ecommerce platform is to run a company blog. A good blog can pull in exceptional amounts of organic traffic as the major search engines have entire systems in place to index and aggregate blogs. Another major advantage with a blog is that the content is far easier to create. Traditionally a blog post is fairly short, being around 350 words long. This means it is quite easy to spend 10 minutes putting together a short blog post, which can be done regularly, instead of investing hours at a time on a single page of website content.

No news is bad news

Send a regular newsletter to the people on your mailing list. This newsletter does not need to be particularly sales orientated, although it should give good value to the reader in the form of information passed on. A good newsletter should contain any recent company news, highlights from the company blog, top level information about any new products and details of any special offers currently in effect. If your company newsletter is informative and interesting your subscribers will want to read it, and by inserting hooks back to the company website within the newsletter you will be encouraging your subscribers to visit the site proper, once there they may make a purchase.

Something for nothing

Don’t be afraid of offering special deals or discounts. People just love to think they are getting something for nothing, so why not give it to them? One of the most successful ways to develop product discounts is to interrogate the logs kept by your ecommerce system. Try and highlight products that have had many people view them, yet few have actually purchased. This situation is a certain indication that the product is desirable but the price is too high. Offering a discount on these types of products often results in an overwhelming response. If you are the kind of company which sells services instead of tangible products then you could try discount vouchers which give a percentage discount on certain services.

So there we have it, five very simple ways to promote your site and bring your visitors back time and time again. All traffic is valuable but target traffic is crucial to a successful business venture. Once targeted traffic reaches your site make sure it does not simply depart and never return, catch it and exploit it.