8 ways to turn a new site visitor into a regular visitor
What, besides a successful concept, and a team capable of implementing it, is the key to a stable growth of the audience of the information site? Ability to keep a visitor.
Whatever the attendance of your project, if you do not think about turning every new visitor into a permanent one, you are reckless. With the disappearance or significant reduction of traffic from any of your key sources (for example, Yandex, Google or Rambler, which are often important suppliers of visitors for electronic media), attendance rates will fall sharply. Such a fall can be especially noticeable in the case of a young project, when it has some advertising budget for the initial promotion. As soon as this budget ends, a drop in attendance can be disastrous. And we do not want such falls, right?
The question is what to do? The answer is to maximize the use of various ways to assign a visitor to a project. Make it so that, having come once, a person comes again and again. To do this, after he closes the browser window, he takes with him a “gift” that will remind him of our website in those alarming moments when he is outside of it.
In recent years, quite a few ways to keep a visitor have been invented. I have seen exotic and even paradoxical solutions, but from the experience of many years of work with projects of the Royber PC and customer sites, which I advised, no more than a dozen tools work most efficiently. Here they are…
Email newsletter
Classics of the genre. The oldest, but not lost its relevance, way to re-attract a visitor to the site. Offer the visitor to subscribe to the news of your project, fresh materials and similar information products, and if he likes the list, you will receive a loyal user, whose visits to the site will become regular. However, remember that the decision to subscribe to your newsletter should be a conscious step of the user. You should not be cunning and trying to receive an e-mail of the user, say, during registration, to send to him the materials not requested by him. This will certainly be regarded as spam, will cause reputational damage to your project, and the subscriber and visitor in one person, cursing you and your project for intrusiveness, will disappear forever.
In addition, we used the following scheme in our two e-journals: we use our own mailing mechanism, to which those who wish to subscribe from the site subscribe, plus we made mirrors to the mailing lists on the most popular Runet mailing services, which brings a significant number of additional subscribers. But I must say that the topic of the subtleties of organizing an effective mailing with mirrors and a system of automatic generation of issues is too extensive. About this I will write a separate article.
It is worth saying that you can release one site distribution list, and you can dilute information flows by topic and create several almost unrelated newsletters. A vivid example of this approach is demonstrated by the magazine Myjane.ru, which publishes more than 20 regular thematic newsletters under various project headings.
RSS feeds
Although RSS, as a way of transmitting information, appeared more than 10 years ago, the pace of its distribution among the mass user leaves much to be desired. On the “non-gikovskaya” sites, the RSS subscription is used relatively little by visitors. For example, our magazine “ SchoolLife.ru ”, having a natural attendance of 30-40 thousand people per day and more than 80 thousand e-mail subscribers, has just a little more than one thousand RSS-subscribers. Do not accept until a massive reader RSS. Difficult and dreary for him, apparently, to deal with RSS-readers. However, over time, I think, literacy in this matter will increase. The question is how much and when ... In a word - there should be RSS on the site, and the effect of it, of course, is, but so far it is relatively small.
')
Export to bloghostings
A visitor who has an account on one of the blog hosting sites is often more comfortable to receive announcements of updates of your project through his friend tape. To do this, it makes sense to create accounts of your project in the most popular blogging sites of Runet and regularly publish announcements of new materials there. The most reasonable, of course, is to do it automatically, and not manually.
Today we publish in this way several projects in LiveJournal and LiveInternet . This is, for example, the announcements of our “Holiday Calendar” in LiveJournal . However, over time, perhaps, we will think about making similar announcements also in the Blogi@Mail.Ru and Ya.ru, which has grown considerably lately.
Browser Toolbars
In some cases, as a way to keep the visitor, the creation of toolbars for the main browsers has great promise. It's about Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. According to Runet statistics, today it is about 97-98% of users in total. It is impractical to worry about others who use exotic programs to access the Internet. The exhaust will be extremely small.
The undoubted plus of the toolbar is that, once installed, it constantly looms before the user's eyes and reminds of the site to which it relates, the arrival of new materials or other activities. But in this lies the pitfall - users for the same reason very carefully decide on the installation of the toolbar, and do it only when they certainly understand the feasibility and value of such an installation.
Therefore, while plotting the development of a toolbar for a project, I recommend to think carefully about what it should be, what it is for and the main thing - is it worth it at all? It may be that your excellent in all respects toolbar just does not seem necessary to visitors, and then, no matter how good and functional it may be, there will be no benefit from it.
For us, the experience of using toolbars with our project Memori.ru was an example of unconditionally successful use of toolbars.
Graphic and text informers
The use of informers of different types is a direct illustration of the expression “with the world on a thread”. The fact is that informers, no matter how good they are, put either blogs, which, as a rule, have low attendance, or (now I will say a terrible thing) amateur or semi-professional projects - those who lack their content and who are so seeks to fill its shortage. Of course, there are exceptions when the informer on his own initiative and without payment establishes a professional, visited resource. But this is a big rarity.
However, even if only 3-5 people a day come from each site that has set up an informer, provided there are a significant number of such sources, this is a good trickle of traffic.
We successfully used informers on the “Holiday Calendar” where the “Holidays Today” informer was made in several variations and the “Nearest Holidays of the Country” informer (more than a hundred different types). As you can see, both were done both in the form of a picture and in the form of text hyperlinks with extensive customization options. Today, these informers are installed on several thousand websites and blogs.
An example of one of the "holiday" informers site "Holiday Calendar"
Gadget for Google Desktop and iGoogle
Google is actively promoting its Google Desktop product, the main part of which is Google search, and the opportunity to connect various gadgets to this applet is a pleasant addition.
The gadget gallery is presented on the program website itself , and you can find them on the websites of various developers.
iGoogle is the Google start page, accessible to registered users, where you can also put gadgets. Gadgets for Google Desktop and iGoogle are not exactly identical from a technological point of view, but a universal solution can be developed, and today I see this option as the most reasonable from the point of view of economy of efforts.
The easiest way is to create a gadget with a search on your site or announcements of news, articles, videos, etc. In a word, it will be regularly updated and may be interesting to your project fan. However, do not implement a trivial solution. The more original and convenient your gadget will be, the more popular it will be among users.
Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget
So far, Vista’s share in RuNet is no more than 10%, however, the existing percentages are tens of thousands of users. The sidebar of Vista is similar to Google Desktop.
The logic of the functioning of gadgets also repeats the logic of the application for Google.
It is important to remember that in relation to the gadget for Windows Vista, as for similar modules of Google Desktop and iGoogle, it will be fair to say above about toolbars - develop a gadget when it is clear who and why will use it. Otherwise, your product runs the risk of being among thousands of useless, forgotten modules.
Vkontakte application
In the spring of this year, the social network Vkontakte, following its Facebook prototype, opened up the possibility of creating custom flash applications. The most popular Vkontakte applications are installed today on hundreds of thousands of pages of users of this site and have tens of thousands of hits per day. The opportunities provided to the developer are, of course, small, but, given the multi-million attendance of this project, even these opportunities can be used to good advantage of your site.
The other day we completed the development of the application “ Holidays, events, names today ” for Vkontakte. Today, the application is installed on several hundred custom pages.
Every day we get about 200-300 transitions from there to the site. But the number of installations, as well as the number of transitions, is rapidly growing, and it can be assumed that within a month we will consistently receive about a thousand visitors. A year later, with successful developments, the traffic from this application can be several tens of thousands of people per day.
***
It's time to finish. In conclusion, I would say that the use of all the described ways to export information without regard to the features of the site may not only be useless, but, in some cases, harmful. Look at the specifics of your project, think about the characteristics, possible habits of the dominant audience. And based on this, decide which of these solutions are suitable for you, and in what form to implement them.
The source is the blog of Internet producer Maxim Spiridonov .
Whatever the attendance of your project, if you do not think about turning every new visitor into a permanent one, you are reckless. With the disappearance or significant reduction of traffic from any of your key sources (for example, Yandex, Google or Rambler, which are often important suppliers of visitors for electronic media), attendance rates will fall sharply. Such a fall can be especially noticeable in the case of a young project, when it has some advertising budget for the initial promotion. As soon as this budget ends, a drop in attendance can be disastrous. And we do not want such falls, right?
The question is what to do? The answer is to maximize the use of various ways to assign a visitor to a project. Make it so that, having come once, a person comes again and again. To do this, after he closes the browser window, he takes with him a “gift” that will remind him of our website in those alarming moments when he is outside of it.
In recent years, quite a few ways to keep a visitor have been invented. I have seen exotic and even paradoxical solutions, but from the experience of many years of work with projects of the Royber PC and customer sites, which I advised, no more than a dozen tools work most efficiently. Here they are…
Email newsletter
Classics of the genre. The oldest, but not lost its relevance, way to re-attract a visitor to the site. Offer the visitor to subscribe to the news of your project, fresh materials and similar information products, and if he likes the list, you will receive a loyal user, whose visits to the site will become regular. However, remember that the decision to subscribe to your newsletter should be a conscious step of the user. You should not be cunning and trying to receive an e-mail of the user, say, during registration, to send to him the materials not requested by him. This will certainly be regarded as spam, will cause reputational damage to your project, and the subscriber and visitor in one person, cursing you and your project for intrusiveness, will disappear forever.
In addition, we used the following scheme in our two e-journals: we use our own mailing mechanism, to which those who wish to subscribe from the site subscribe, plus we made mirrors to the mailing lists on the most popular Runet mailing services, which brings a significant number of additional subscribers. But I must say that the topic of the subtleties of organizing an effective mailing with mirrors and a system of automatic generation of issues is too extensive. About this I will write a separate article.
It is worth saying that you can release one site distribution list, and you can dilute information flows by topic and create several almost unrelated newsletters. A vivid example of this approach is demonstrated by the magazine Myjane.ru, which publishes more than 20 regular thematic newsletters under various project headings.
RSS feeds
Although RSS, as a way of transmitting information, appeared more than 10 years ago, the pace of its distribution among the mass user leaves much to be desired. On the “non-gikovskaya” sites, the RSS subscription is used relatively little by visitors. For example, our magazine “ SchoolLife.ru ”, having a natural attendance of 30-40 thousand people per day and more than 80 thousand e-mail subscribers, has just a little more than one thousand RSS-subscribers. Do not accept until a massive reader RSS. Difficult and dreary for him, apparently, to deal with RSS-readers. However, over time, I think, literacy in this matter will increase. The question is how much and when ... In a word - there should be RSS on the site, and the effect of it, of course, is, but so far it is relatively small.
')
Export to bloghostings
A visitor who has an account on one of the blog hosting sites is often more comfortable to receive announcements of updates of your project through his friend tape. To do this, it makes sense to create accounts of your project in the most popular blogging sites of Runet and regularly publish announcements of new materials there. The most reasonable, of course, is to do it automatically, and not manually.
Today we publish in this way several projects in LiveJournal and LiveInternet . This is, for example, the announcements of our “Holiday Calendar” in LiveJournal . However, over time, perhaps, we will think about making similar announcements also in the Blogi@Mail.Ru and Ya.ru, which has grown considerably lately.
Browser Toolbars
In some cases, as a way to keep the visitor, the creation of toolbars for the main browsers has great promise. It's about Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. According to Runet statistics, today it is about 97-98% of users in total. It is impractical to worry about others who use exotic programs to access the Internet. The exhaust will be extremely small.
The undoubted plus of the toolbar is that, once installed, it constantly looms before the user's eyes and reminds of the site to which it relates, the arrival of new materials or other activities. But in this lies the pitfall - users for the same reason very carefully decide on the installation of the toolbar, and do it only when they certainly understand the feasibility and value of such an installation.
Installing a toolbar is like deciding on a tattoo. Once done, and then it is very long or even forever with you ... you wonder if it is necessary ...
Therefore, while plotting the development of a toolbar for a project, I recommend to think carefully about what it should be, what it is for and the main thing - is it worth it at all? It may be that your excellent in all respects toolbar just does not seem necessary to visitors, and then, no matter how good and functional it may be, there will be no benefit from it.
For us, the experience of using toolbars with our project Memori.ru was an example of unconditionally successful use of toolbars.
Graphic and text informers
An informer is a graphic or text module located on a third-party site that uses information from the donor site and has a hyperlink (s) to it.
The use of informers of different types is a direct illustration of the expression “with the world on a thread”. The fact is that informers, no matter how good they are, put either blogs, which, as a rule, have low attendance, or (now I will say a terrible thing) amateur or semi-professional projects - those who lack their content and who are so seeks to fill its shortage. Of course, there are exceptions when the informer on his own initiative and without payment establishes a professional, visited resource. But this is a big rarity.
However, even if only 3-5 people a day come from each site that has set up an informer, provided there are a significant number of such sources, this is a good trickle of traffic.
We successfully used informers on the “Holiday Calendar” where the “Holidays Today” informer was made in several variations and the “Nearest Holidays of the Country” informer (more than a hundred different types). As you can see, both were done both in the form of a picture and in the form of text hyperlinks with extensive customization options. Today, these informers are installed on several thousand websites and blogs.
An example of one of the "holiday" informers site "Holiday Calendar"
Gadget for Google Desktop and iGoogle
Google is actively promoting its Google Desktop product, the main part of which is Google search, and the opportunity to connect various gadgets to this applet is a pleasant addition.
The gadget gallery is presented on the program website itself , and you can find them on the websites of various developers.
iGoogle is the Google start page, accessible to registered users, where you can also put gadgets. Gadgets for Google Desktop and iGoogle are not exactly identical from a technological point of view, but a universal solution can be developed, and today I see this option as the most reasonable from the point of view of economy of efforts.
The easiest way is to create a gadget with a search on your site or announcements of news, articles, videos, etc. In a word, it will be regularly updated and may be interesting to your project fan. However, do not implement a trivial solution. The more original and convenient your gadget will be, the more popular it will be among users.
Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget
So far, Vista’s share in RuNet is no more than 10%, however, the existing percentages are tens of thousands of users. The sidebar of Vista is similar to Google Desktop.
The logic of the functioning of gadgets also repeats the logic of the application for Google.
It is important to remember that in relation to the gadget for Windows Vista, as for similar modules of Google Desktop and iGoogle, it will be fair to say above about toolbars - develop a gadget when it is clear who and why will use it. Otherwise, your product runs the risk of being among thousands of useless, forgotten modules.
Vkontakte application
In the spring of this year, the social network Vkontakte, following its Facebook prototype, opened up the possibility of creating custom flash applications. The most popular Vkontakte applications are installed today on hundreds of thousands of pages of users of this site and have tens of thousands of hits per day. The opportunities provided to the developer are, of course, small, but, given the multi-million attendance of this project, even these opportunities can be used to good advantage of your site.
The other day we completed the development of the application “ Holidays, events, names today ” for Vkontakte. Today, the application is installed on several hundred custom pages.
Every day we get about 200-300 transitions from there to the site. But the number of installations, as well as the number of transitions, is rapidly growing, and it can be assumed that within a month we will consistently receive about a thousand visitors. A year later, with successful developments, the traffic from this application can be several tens of thousands of people per day.
***
It's time to finish. In conclusion, I would say that the use of all the described ways to export information without regard to the features of the site may not only be useless, but, in some cases, harmful. Look at the specifics of your project, think about the characteristics, possible habits of the dominant audience. And based on this, decide which of these solutions are suitable for you, and in what form to implement them.
The source is the blog of Internet producer Maxim Spiridonov .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/46127/
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