You catch more flies with honey. Make sure readers stick to your web site!

We’ve talked about how to keep readers on your site longer. Now let’s look at how to get them to come back often.

Offer Your Expertise

You are an expert at what you do. Make your web site a resource of the useful, the informative or the entertaining: Reader will remember you. They’ll bookmark you. They’ll come back to your site—and to your business—and they’ll mention both to others.

Let’s say you’re promoting your restaurant. Post the menu and some ambience-expressive photos and you’ve got an acceptable website. But … invest a bit of time offering your expertise to readers, and they’ll stick around.  You could, for example:

• Post some recipes, such as your pastry chef’s famous honey-soaked baklava
• Include a links page to other sites, such as the National Honey Board
• Write an article pertinent to your business. Express an opinion on careers in hospitality, on downtown gridlock, on dining etiquette, on high fructose corn syrup. (You can post an article a month, even one each quarter. Just keep them fresh and relevant.)

You needn’t do all this yourself. Find someone to update the site for you, or someone to research appropriate links and keep them updated; hire someone to write for you (hello!).

Offering your expertise on your web site has these other benefits:

• As you become the reliable source of info, your readers develop confidence in you and your product or service.
• When you inform readers, you’re qualifying prospective customers.
• When you educate readers via the website, you’ll spend less time educating them, individually, later on—cutting down on repeated phone inquiries such as “If I have you install a low-flow toilet, how much water will I save?” or “What time can we come watch your Zookeeper feed the lions?”

Information on your site will keep readers interested, keep them reading, and bring them back.