How to Make Your Website “Sticky”

By Lisa Chapman on March 22, 2011

Grab and Hold Your Visitors’ Attention

“Sticky” means that once a visitor lands on your page, they want to stay and look around. Here are some tips – how to grab and hold your visitors’ attention and create a sticky site:

  • Attention-grabbing headline and subhead – within 2-3 seconds.
  • Relevant and interesting pictures & images.
  • Easy site navigation.
  • CLEAR AND COMPELLING ‘CALL TO ACTION’! (State exactly what you want them to do.)
  • White space around important text.
  • Authentic, original, meaningful information.
  • Long tail keywords in headline, subheads, images, and content – italicized & bolded.
  • Articles related to the niche topic.
  • White papers / Reports.
  • Video / Audio / Podcasts on ‘How-To” topics.
  • Blog – new content 3x/week – with visitor comment capability.
  • Discussion forum.
  • Online press kit and examples of your media coverage.
  • Bookmarks.
  • RSS feeds.
  • Opt-in email emphasizing “no share” privacy policy – with an auto-responder.
  • Security emphasized on every page.
  • Traffic Stats for monitoring.

Add Comment Capability

Disqus Comments is a comment system and moderation tool for your site. This service lets you add community management and social web integrations to any site on any platform. Hundreds of thousands of sites, from small blogs to large publications, use Disqus Comments for their discussion communities. Try a demo and sign up for a free version: http://www.disqus.com/

Add a Forum

Engage your visitors and make your site stickier by adding a forum. Lefora offers free forums to imbed in your site. There is nothing to download, and no limit on the number of forums you can create. With the free version, you get 10GB of monthly bandwidth. On public forums, every topic has a button that will allow your members to share a link to the topic on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace. http://www.lefora.com/

Do you have stories to share about how these tactics have worked for you? Other tactics?

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For more resources, see our Library topics Marketing and Social Networking.

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ABOUT Lisa M. Chapman:

Ms. Chapman’s new book has a name change! The Net-Powered Entrepreneur –  A Step-by-Step Guide will be available very soon. With offices in Nashville Tennessee, but working virtually with international clients, Lisa M. Chapman serves her clients as a business and marketing coach, business planning consultant and social media consultant. As a Founder of iBrand Masters, a social media consulting firm, Lisa Chapman helps clients to establish and enhance their online brand, attract their target market, engage them in meaningful social media conversations, and convert online traffic into revenues. Email: Lisa @ LisaChapman.com