One of the biggest problems faced by any site trying to build readership is retention. Attracting visitors is hard work, and if you’re going to make the most of those efforts, you need to do something to keep readers coming back. Good content alone won’t do it.
“I don’t like to pay for the same real estate twice,” said George S. Patton, in the eponymously named 1970 film classic. (I don’t know if the real George S. Patton ever really said this, but it seems consistent with his persona.) It concisely describes what many site managers do: work hard to attract visitors but do nothing to retain them as regular readers.
Building repeat visitor traffic can be done in many ways. The first and most obvious way is to encourage users to bookmark your site. Unfortunately, this is the least effective method since people simply don’t bookmark sites the way they once did; even when they do there is no guarantee that they’ll remember to use the bookmark they’ve created.
The next method is to offer an RSS feed and encourage users to subscribe to it. What this method has going for it is that RSS is a ‘push’ method; once someone subscribes to your feed, the next time you publish something it will show up in their reader – no action is required on their part. The downside of RSS is that, aside from power users and techies, most people don’t know what it is or how to use it, and trying to convince them to subscribe to something they don’t understand will be a wasted effort.
The last method is ‘Subscribe via Email.’ It may seem passé, so 20th century, to even suggest it, but personal experience has shown this to be one of the most effective methods of bringing visitors back to a site. You can see an example of this at work in my sidebar at right. The technique works for blogs just as well as it works for e-commerce sites, and it does so because, when people find something they like, they want to get more of it, and they want to get it in the easiest possible way. Email fits this bill nicely.
The best part is that if you have an RSS feed – and just about every blogging or e-commerce platform does these days – you can deliver your content to subscribers without any additional work. All you need to do is find a service that will take that feed and retransmit it to your readership. One of the most widely used (and the one I use here at The Well Run Site) is Feedburner. Feedburner is great for adding all sorts of functionality to an RSS feed, but it also offers a free Email Subscriptions feature that is all most sites will ever need.
If you need more control over how things look or how often they’re sent, you may want to consider one of the commercial services specializing in email newsletter marketing. Some the biggest are Mailchimp, Aweber, and Constant Contact. (I’ve been singing Mailchimp’s praises for quite a while. See here and here for more.)
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