Cheryl Miller
When visitors bookmark your site it is a sign that you have built a great website and are pleasing them. Visitors think highly enough of your site to want to return and possibly tell others about it. You are not only increasing traffic from your existing clientele you are encouraging new traffic by means of viral marketing.
What exactly is book marking? It is when a visitor to your site decides that they like your site enough to place it in their favorites so that they may return and look over it some more.
How to make book marking easy for your visitors: You can place a small script http://www.jscode.com/js_auto_bookmark.shtml from this website. It is free. Or you can look on Google for other book marking scripts (free book marking script). Internet Explorer already has an option for this called "favorites."
Ways to encourage visitors to bookmark your site:
1. Your content: make it high quality and interesting. You can write articles about:
2. Always add new content on a regular basis-keeps visitors returning. Always let visitors know that your site is updated on a regular basis
3. Make your site professional looking
4. Make it user friendly with simple navigation
5. If your site is large you may want to make a table of contents with clickable links
6. Have links to different sites that are good resources. Add these on a regular basis
7. Quizzes and trivia questions relating to your industry-the answers will be found on one of your important pages
Of course there are obvious things that will discourage book marking:
1. A boring site with no real content or resources
2. Inaccurate information or rehashed information
3. Poor web design-just appears tacky and looks like it was written by a kindergartener
4. Slow loading-visitors will not wait longer than 2 seconds.
5. Hype-this is very unprofessional and visitors get annoyed by this and leave
Visitor duration and page selection: A useful piece of information about your site is checking traffic and how long your visitors are staying on any given page. You can see this by looking at your log files. This can be done by a Cpanel or whatever your web host has set up. You can view things like:
1. The amount of visitors that have come to your site- monthly weekly or daily
2. How many bots are visiting
3. Your most popular pages
4. How many error 404 pages you had
5. How long visitors are staying at each page
This is all valuable information and will give you a good idea of what is interesting your visitors and allows you to work on the areas that are attracting them.
Business owners often overlook book marking but when you pay attention to what is useful and attractive to your visitors you will encourage book marking and many return visitors. Once visitors are in the habit of returning they will familiarize themselves with your website and be much more likely to buy. Don't you buy more from your favorite store?
About the Author:
Cheryl Miller is an entrepreneur specializing in niche markets. For more information about magnetic badges and how they can help you promote your business, please visit http://www.badgemags.com. Cheryl is also the publisher of the Magnetic Marketer Newsletter: http://www.badgemags.com/magnetic_marketer_subscribe.htm
