FACT: Authority sites bring back a large percentage of regular visitors.
When you find raw statistics on traffic to a site, one thing to keep in mind is that a healthy, valuable site (as voted by your visitors who return frequently) will bring people back again and again.
The graphic below shows a segment of the traffic to The Friday Traffic Report. Notice the percentage of returning visitors vs. the number of new visitors.
That 21.75% returning group is more likely to purchase from you and is in a process of being groomed as the best kind of customer a site can have.
That percentage comprises the only real “free traffic” there is for a website owner.
Bringing new visits to a site costs something – always. Time is a cost and the time spent promoting a site to get new visitors is expensive no matter whether you actually spent money to bring those visitors to your site.
To have a content site worthy of repeat visitors, your content needs to be a mix of syndicated and original, unique content.
The original content must be something worth checking out in your market.
The more time you spend putting together really good reports, reviews, stories, and other types of content for your niche, the better your return visits will be.
This is called “visitor loyalty” and is achieved without mailing your subscribers and asking them to come back for new features.
They should come back on their own as well. This will indicate whether your site is standing on its own power and succeeding with the content your are putting on it.
How to Get More Visitor Loyalty…
1. Make it easy to subscribe via email and RSS feed.
2. Produce content that outshines your competition.
3. Produce content regularly, preferably once a day (this will also bring in more new visitors as you get new content into the engine more regularly and tag content so that places like Technorati pick you up often as well.)
4. Prove yourself as an authority by syndicating content regularly and allowing your visitors to continually find your content on other respected sites.
Of course, loyal visitors only develop after you have regular traffic to your site and you have accomplished the above.
How to Get More Traffic to Your Site…
1. Blog: if you are not blogging with powerful marketing tools that only blogging offers, you are missing a massive portion of possible traffic to your site. The only way to build a high-traffic blog with all the tools you need to take full advantage of RSS marketing and syndication is through WordPress Master. (Provided exclusively by Content Desk “Content Publisher’s Alliance”)
2. Article Syndication: Some say article syndication is dead as an effective traffic source. The same people also write TERRIBLE content for their niche or simply spam article directories with content they wrote (or had written) in 10 minutes. People who really belong on top write good, well-thought-out content before they syndicate a word of it.
3. Tag and Ping: This is a massive traffic source from the social bookmarking craze which is really just now starting to pick up serious attention of marketers and bloggers of all kinds.
4. Traffic exchanges that actually work: The only two that I know work for sure are Instant Buzz and Traffic Swarm.
There are many more ways to get new traffic and convert it to visitor loyalty, but the above should serve you well for weeks worth of marketing and learning.