Adding Stickiness to Your Website

Your site is up, so now how do you make it special and filled with content that attracts visitors and keeps them coming back? That mission consumes site-builders, both full-time professionals and part-timers, but if there is one fact we now know to be absolutely true, it is this: Simplicity is best.

Case in point: The Web site for a luxury hotel chain based in India features a huge soundtrack of classical music, and it's just annoying. Maybe some sitar tracks--authentic Indian music--might make sense, but classical? It's bandwidth-hogging craziness. Resist the temptation to put something on your site just because you can. Never put up content that slows access to a page but doesn't demonstrably heighten user value.

What does work? content that gives users reasons to linger, to absorb more of what you're offering. You'll find there are many, many ways to introduce this content, and you are going to have to exercise real discretion here. Pick a few tools, try them out, monitor user responses, then delete the ones that aren't proving valuable. Be ruthless here, and never forget that simple is better.

That understood, here are many tasty tools for you to use in beefing up your site. Just remember, this may be an all-you-can-eat buffet, but the more you put on your plate, the more discomfort your Web site viewers will feel.

E-mail Lists. You want to experiment with a tool that lets customers talk among themselves about your products and services? An e-mail list gives you that capability. The smartest, simplest way to create a list is at areas like Yahoo! Groups. There are many options available. Lists can be private, open only to members you approve, or public, open to all who knock on the door. My advice: Experiment with several types of lists, perhaps a private one for existing customers and a public one for all comers.

Either way, carefully monitor traffic. To be useful, a list needs a steady flow of traffic and at least a few messages daily. Initially, you might encourage friends and colleagues to post just to get the list going, but eventually you'll need a site that generates sufficient traffic or your lists will collapse from nonuse. When they work (and they often do), lists are a fast way to spice up a site with the kind of interactivity that keeps surfers coming back.

Polls. Polls, where surfers register their opinion on an issue, are at the heart of the Net because this is interactivity in its most basic form. Ask any question--"Should pornography be banned from the Web?" "What's your favorite cocktail?" "Who's your favorite Beatle?" It doesn't matter: Surfers will want to register their point of view and see how others voted. AOL has long used polls as a staple on its pages. Learn from the masters and do likewise.
Writing a poll from scratch is a trick bit of coding, but free poll templates are readily available for insertion into your site. All you have to do is fill in the blanks in a template, copy and paste a bit of code into your site, and you're in business. Sources of such templates are plentiful, but a good one is from Freepolls.com.

Weblog (blog). At its most basic, a blog is a frequently updated, timed and dated online journal with a good dose of links involved. That may not sound like much to get excited about, but it has gone beyond fad to become a full-fledged Internet phenomenon. The elements of interactivity, community and collaboration will be key as growing businesses adopt blogs for customer relations, advertising, promotion and even internal communications. One well-known business example is software company Macromedia's use of blogging to keep customers updated on what's happening with its products.

Chat rooms. Wouldn't it be cool if your site had its own private real-time chat room? It's both easy to put up and free from LiveUniverse http://liveuniverse.com. Just search the page for the link to the chat tool, register and in a matter of minutes you'll be able to put folks to chatting.
Before you do, however, mull on this: Empty chat rooms look very, very dumb. Will you have enough traffic to put people into a chat room on a regular basis? Do you want to monitor it? How frequently? Know that you won't be on call 24/7--but the chat room will, theoretically, be available that often. My advice: For most small sites, this is a tool to avoid.

Better by far is to set yourself up with a free AOL, Yahoo! or MSN instant messenger account where visitors can fire off questions to you if you're online. This gives surfers an alternative to e-mail for finding information, but doesn't expose you to the ridicule that comes with offering an unpopulated chat room. Do this in combination with providing a message board, and surfer needs ought to be very adequately handled.

Guest books. Sure, you could create a guest book using a CGI script, but probably the easier way is to insert some HTML code into your page--and you will find it at 1-2-3 Web Tools. Why would you want a guest book at all? It's a convenient way to collect more information about your visitors. And incidentally, surfers often like to look through guest books.

News feeds, content and more. A secret traffic-builder of the big Web sites is regularly changing content. Usually that means paying writers and other content creators big bucks to produce copy, but you don't need to spend that kind of money.
There are plenty of legitimate ways to get new content without having to write it all yourself. If you have a special interest site, many of your readers may enjoy contributing occasional stories, just for the thrill of seeing their names in virtual print. Also, if you see an article you like somewhere on the Net, you may be able to get permission to reprint it. I get requests like these on a regular basis, and I'm usually more than happy to grant permission. If it's a small site, I don't ask for money; if it's a large one, sometimes just the extra exposure and an added link back to my own Web site is adequate compensation.

Another common technique is to incorporate a newsfeed onto your site. This can be done a lot cheaper than you would imagine, and it automatically keeps your site updated with a fresh news section. The process is simple: The newsfeed provider simply gives you a piece of code, which you paste directly onto your Web page. They take it from there. The news window that this code makes appear on your site links back directly to their own news server, constantly updating the content in the background. Two places to look for newsfeeds are Screamingmedia and iSyndicate. If you're on a tighter budget, there are free or very low-cost models that often supplement their content with advertising. You can find a list of free sources at FreeSticky. But examine the content carefully before incorporating it--some of the free content may be nothing more than a thinly disguised advertisement for something unrelated to your Web site's mission.

Daily content. As simple as it sounds, many Web visitors appreciate sites that offer a "tip of the day" and visit them on a daily basis, often in the morning, to glean the day's tip. Or, they subscribe to a daily newsletter full of tips--and advertising. Many sites offer philosophical tips, which assist readers in reflecting on various aspects of their lives. For example, sites that encourage positive thinking offer some daily message of optimism. religious sites offer daily prayers. Literary sites offer quotes from famous authors. Humor sites offer daily jokes.
To start, you don't have to come up with 365 of them; instead work on one month's set of tips. Then, say one month ahead. It helps to consult a calendar for the coming year so you can align your tips with the days of the week, holidays and other special occasions. When you consume all 365 tips (or less if you choose just to update Monday through Friday), feel free to dispense the same tips again for the coming year. Few Web site visitors, even those who visited your site every day to read the daily tip, will be aware or concerned that one year's set of tips was the same as the last. In subsequent years, however, it probably does make sense to develop new sets of tips. You can only run the same information for so long.

Back to How to Start an E-Business