Grow your traffic by over 300% for FREE within 3 months

If you build your traffic to say at least 200 visitors per day for example which is a very achievable target for any new website then the next step would be to watch that grow rapidly if you spend time implementing strategy to make your website sticky, yes you may have read that term many many times but taking the time out to analyse your website and look at your numbers tells you whether your doing it correctly or not.

Firstly check your new versus repeat visitor numbers, growing your repeat visitor numbers not only helps waterproof you from any sudden ranking drops by Google, it also lets you grow rapidly using your existing user base.

I would aim for somewhere in the high 20’s, even for a well monetised website if you do a good job you should be looking for at least 20% returning visitor percentage. For my tattoo website it is 22.25% and I noticed from Al’s post yesterday his is around 25% for his gadget site.

If you can make 20% of your visitors return then after a week of getting 200 visitors per day you could be looking at an extra 280 visitors in week 2 for FREE! Extrapolate that through 3 months and you could go from 200 visitors per day to 640 just using the same new 200 visitors per day that arrive to your site and retaining 40 of them.

At the start refraining from using adsense and instant monetisation is important as that very quickly takes your new visitor off site when you need to be building a good user base, most of the methods are very simple but can have a huge influence over your traffic numbers over a short period.

To demonstrate we are talking about retaining 40 visitors per day from 200 visitors being fresh traffic so basically adding 280 visitors per week to your current stats.
Week 1 1400
Week 2 1680
Week 3 1960
Week 4 2240
.
.
.
Week 12 = 4480 visitors - that’s going from 200 per day to 640 per day in 3 months!
Apply that to a larger website and it like going from 1000 visitors per day to 3400 per day, therefore probably one of the most important jobs to focus on and it is free for the most part.

Things that can make a difference in my experience

• Having an ‘Add to favourites’ link or button, make it prominent and have it throughout your website, traffic arrives into all your pages not just your homepage, have it in the navigation and at the end of ALL articles or pages, don’t make people look for it.
• Reduce monetisation like adsense while you build the userbase up
• Have a Favicon, quick and easy to add and lets the bookmark stand out in a browsers favourite list potentially alerting bored users to the bookmark and returning.
• Get user involvement, if visitors add comments, images, text or suggestions they are far more likely to return to see how other visitors feel, this can be rating images, voting, polls, comments, suggestions and competitions.
• Have a mailing list if applicable, a mailing list is a great way to alert previous users of new changes and additions thus surging returning users.
• Add a forum, again if you feel it will work a forum offers a great incentive for users to return.
• Empower your visitors, letting visitors decide in certain aspects of how your website works empowers them and offers a great incentive for them to enjoy your website and return so try and let them decide as much as possible how they experience your site, this may be allowing registered users the ability to affect ads, colour schemes, navigation etc
• RSS feeds allow visitors to subscribe to the latest content from your website but if you run a blog do not presume your readership will all be tech savy, guide your visitors through the process.
• Most importantly, give them what they are looking for! Trickery and misinformation is great maybe for short term gain but if your here for the long haul and want that one website to do well over a long period of time then give users what they are looking for, at the very least offer a certain amount for free and offer subscription paid services for more content & features.

Aside from forum based websites I think most website showing around 20%-30% repeat traffic numbers would be doing a good job of encouraging return visits and in turn building a safer future from the source of current traffic, any less than that and I’d consider it high on the todo list.