One way to attract more attention to your website is by inviting people to check it out. Most people will forget to come back to a website, so you have to remind them when you have something new.
There are a few ways that you can remind people. Some of these ways work better than others. All of them help new people discover your website and come back after they’ve visited before. Here are four way that easily invite people back to check out your website.
RSS
One way is to provide RSS subscription options on your site. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and it is a process that lets people subscribe to updates on your website and receive the updates in an app of their choice, they can then read them whenever they want.
To read RSS updates, a visitor can use several apps. They can use Feedly, Flipboard (iOS & Android), even Safari for Mac can subscribe to RSS, you can also install plugins or addons for Firefox and Chrome to read RSS feeds. Think of an RSS app as an inbox for updates from the websites you want to follow. My favorite is Feedly.
The problem with RSS is that many people don’t know about it and sometimes even if they know, they want another option besides RSS. Even though it has been around for about 10 years, it is still a technical geeky thing to do so most people don’t actually use it.
Social Media
You can post your new blogpost or updates to your website on your social media profiles, like Facebook and Twitter. But that method is over crowded, it has less chances of working than RSS does.
I recommend you still share your posts on your social networks to extend the reach and maybe pick up some new visitors to your site.
Social networks are really great for discovery, but don’t expect all your friends or connections to come back to your website because you post on your various profiles.
In addition to Facebook and Twitter, you can use bookmarking and discovery sites like: Delicious, Diigo, Pinterest, and even complimentary hosted blogs like blogger.com and wordpress.com. But this takes time and the results are still not very easy to verify.
Physical promotional items
Never dismiss the power of promotional items that you can touch and feel. If you’re serious about your blog or website, get some of these. I currently have a pen in front of me, it was given to me about 3 years ago and I have never forgotten the website that’s printed on it. I check it every once in a while.
These promotional items include T-shirts, pens, cups, mugs, stickers, hoodies and other stuff you can make, use, wear or giveaway.
For me, email is the winner. There is no other system out there besides the internet itself that is more widely used. People read email and they read it several times a day.
When people come to your website, give them an option to subscribe to your updates via email. When people subscribe to your email list, they are requesting information from you, they want to receive your email updates so it’s okay to send them the updates. This is not SPAM and you should never feel like you’re spamming them.
Have you noticed that there is a box on the right hand side that lets you subscribe to this website? Besides sending people the updates to the website when you have posted something new, you can send other emails called auto-responders. These let you offer additional benefits, value and allow you to get to know your audience more than any social network will. Remember, email is personal!
If you setup your email system properly, you will give the subscribers an option to unsubscribe and stop receiving your updates if they feel like they have had enough or they’re no longer interested. I recommend Aweber for this, they have a $1 trial going on now and so you can take it for a spin, but I’m pretty sure once you try it, you’ll use it.
Email is next on my list so this is a timely post for me. Thanks, Oscar. Relevant and helpful, as usual.