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A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:
1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox
When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.
2) Start a web log (blog)
Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.
3) Carry out polls or surveys
Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.
4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games
Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.
5) Update frequently with fresh content
Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!
Podcasting is a relatively new method of delivering radio to listeners with internet access. This free method of listening to your favorite radio show is becoming increasingly popular as more and more people learn about it. Podcasting is usually commercial free, which is another reason for its popularity.
Podcasting is also extremely popular because you choose when and where you want to listen to it. You can also decide which episode you want to hear and have a choice of listening to the podcasting episodes on an iPod (where this distribution form got its name from), a computer or any MP3. The flexibility of podcasting has catapulted it into the public’s attention.
In order to get started downloading podcasts, you need to download a podcatcher program. This allows your computer to automatically download podcasting episodes of your favorite radio shows which have been converted into digital audio files. There are several podcatchers, with the most popular being Apple’s iTunes which is also a searching device for new and interesting podcasting. You can use it to find more radio shows that you might be interested in listening to.
Other podcatchers that are free include Juice and Odeo. Both of these podcatchers also have podcasting search engines built in so you find new radio shows to download. Once you have a radio show that you wish to listen to, you can subscribe to the RSS feed so that your podcatcher can download the radio shows without you having to go to the radio website each time a new episode is released. This saves incredible amounts of time and is quite easy to use, as all the podcatchers have an easy to use interface that allows you to subscribe to the RSS feeds with just the click of a button.
Once you have set up your podcasting preferences, you don’t have to worry about anything except searching for new and more interesting podcasting feeds. It is very easy to discard or erase any shows that you no longer enjoy and since all the episodes of your favorite radio shows will be saved on your computer, they are able to be accessed or downloaded to your iPod or MP3 player for easy listening whenever you wish. Unsubscribing from any podcasting broadcast is quite easy as well and you can quickly find new shows to replace the ones you delete.
There are various websites dedicated to podcasting where you can find information and new podcasts as well as fellow radio fanatics who are more than willing to share their favorite radio show feeds with you. Among the more popular are Podcasting News and Podcast as well as Podcast Alley. You can find podcasting forums on all of these websites as well as featured radio shows, both popular and lesser known. It is a good opportunity to find something new and unique for your personal radio programming.
Podcasting is still growing in popularity as it is a fairly new technology. It has great potential though and will probably continue to improve and expand over the years to come, so go ahead and jump in now.
No matter how brilliant your website design is, if it is hard to reach the content of your site then your site is as useful as an empty shell. Here are some tips to improve the usability of your website to ensure it serves its functions optimally.
The first method is to make sure the typography of your content is suitable. If you have large blocks of text, make sure to use CSS to space out the lines accordingly. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be. Also, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily. Some sites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; while that may look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text.
Make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Be it an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can use your site with ease.
Ensure that your site loads fast if you do not want to lose visitors. Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn’t load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure the crème de la crème of your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention.
Last of all, test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing more effective in tarnishing your professional image than broken links, so be very careful about that.