By: Dan Grossman

Making your site "sticky" simply means creating a site that keeps the visitor within the site as long as possible and getting them to return often. Making YOUR site "sticky" involves some extra work on your part, but drawing in traffic and keeping it at your site IS your goal, right? Here are a few things you can do to just that:

UPDATE YOUR SITE FREQUENTLY

Make sure your visitors know you're still alive! Update monthly, weekly if possible, to keep the content fresh. People want to see something new when they return to your site. If you offer a service or sell a product, your visitors will more likely turn into customers if they know you're still active. You could add company news or site updates to your main page.

Even if you don't own a domain, you can still offer email through several services. If you do own a domain, even better! Whenever the person wants to check their mail, they have to return to YOUR site to login. Here are the three top free email providers for website owners wanting to offer email to their users:
* http://www.everyone.net
* http://www.bigmailbox.com
* http://www.zzn.com

ADD NEWS AND WEBFEEDS

This is a simple way to keep your content ALWAYS fresh! Through the wonders of JavaScript, these services allow you to add news headlines and content directly to your site. You can customize it to fit right in with your existing content, and the headlines update themselves automatically:
* http://www.moreover.com
* http://www.isyndicate.com
* http://www.echofactor.com

BUILD A COMMUNITY WITHIN YOUR SITE

This may be one of the more challenging methods of generating return visits, but it's well worth it if you're successful. Build a community by offering a forum or message board on a topic your visitors are interested in. Getting them started is hard, but once you've got it going, people will return to check if anybody's responded to their posts or to read the latest threads. You can easily run one whether you have CGI and Perl access on your web host or if you'd rather have a remotely hosted message board:
* http://www.infopop.com
* http://www.everyone.net
* http://www.coolboard.com

If you can successfully make your site "sticky" enough to bring your visitors back to your site repeatedly, you're guaranteed success!

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About the Author:
Over 250 hand-picked resources, articles, and tools when you visit: http://www.websitegoodies.com - As a bonus, Dan also publishes the free weekly "WebDevPortal" newsletter for website owners! Subscribe today and get articles like this every week: subscribe@webdevportal.com