If the number one goal for most webmasters is to attract as many interested visitors as possible to their sites, the second goal is to keep them coming back again and again. In other words, they want them to bookmark their sites and come back on a regular basis to find out what’s new.
There have been countless articles written over the years explaining how to build traffic to a website, but relatively few explaining how to keep them from coming back. With tongue only half-way in cheek, here are a few tips for ensuring that most of the visitors to your website never, ever return:
1 – Fail to update your content on a regular basis. After all, if your content never changes why should someone take the time to come back to see what’s new? Once they’ve seen your stale site, they’ve seen it. Right?
2 – Have some obnoxious music automatically load even before the text and images finish loading. After all, they’re probably more interested in hearing a tacky tune than learning about the latest and greatest widgets or reading the latest articles in their preferred niche, right? (Especially if they happen to be one of the millions of folks who still access the web via a dial-up connection – yes, they’re still out the there in droves.
3 – Make the decision not to equip your site with a standard, easy to use system of navigation. After all, those who stumble upon your site are likely to hang around longer if they can’t figure out how to leave, right?
4 – Write your articles in one long run-on sentence using the poorest spelling and grammar you can come up with. After all, your visitors will love coming back to a site time and again that makes them feel intellectually superior to the webmaster, right?
5 – Refuse to check your outbound links on occasion to make sure they still work. After all…well, I’ll just refer you back to #3 for the rationale on this one.
6 – Bombard your visitors with about half-a-dozen pop-up windows that automatically re-open every time they close them. After all, they probably enjoy a good challenge, right?
Summary: Of course NOT doing all of the things mentioned above is the point of this article. After all, you’re probably like most webmasters in that you want to entice the folks who visit your site to bookmark it and become “regulars”, right? I thought so. Thanks a bunch for looking. Oh, and come back any time!
About the author: Rick Rouse is the owner of RLROUSE.COM and a number of other popular websites.