How to attract and keep visitors to your website

1. Gone in 60 seconds
How to attract
and keep
visitors to your website
Simon Saunders
Institute of Fundraising
Institute of Fundraising National Convention 2007

2. Main objectives
•attract and increase traffic
•convert visitors to readers
•build a readership

3. Know your medium
•A website/page communicates meaning via a variety
of media.
•Think in terms of text and context - your site is part of
a vast repository of information, not an autonomous
text
•Visits to your site are instantaneous and free; anyone,
anywhere can visit and link to it

4. Know what you want to do
•What do you want to achieve with your site/page.
•Is it a:-
•"brochure siteabout your organisation
•a fundraising campaign
•a membership-building site
•What do you want your reader to do?
•sign up
•donate
•contact you
•send your URL to someone else?

5. Know the potential readership
•Online readers are scanners, not readers
•The internet is not so much a medium that people visit as a virtual
environment that they move through
•Other media can provide demographic information, this doesn�t apply
to the internet in the same way
•People use the web for different reasons, eg:-
•business/commerce
•entertainment/leisure
•Social/romance/sexual
•attitudes - and the value they apply - to online content are different to
those on traditional media

6. Remember - online readers
are...

7. An AIDA model for online marketing
•attract traffic
•Attention
•maintain interest
•Interest
•motivate visitor
•Desire
•visitor joins, contacts,
•Action
or donates

8. Give me…
a click to build a dream on
Attracting and building traffic

9. Perfect and Protect your domain
•To online readers, domain=brand name*
•Protect your domain and your traffic
•buy TLDs, combinations & misspellings of your
brand
•Use (additional) themed/slogan domain names;
many domain names can forward to one site
•cleanishappy.com
•diy.com
*although complex legal issues surround intellectual property and under British law, it's not always that simple

10. Put yourself about - the marketing campaign
•Tell everyone
•hold a launch event, even a virtual one; make something
happen on launch day
•electronic press releases & mailshots
• links in email signatures
•get links to your site, anywhere
•email webmasters of relevant sites for links. Reciprocate.
•Talk is cheap - use free sites
•use blogs, social networking sites, flickr, youtube
•eg. does it blend? The Living Tree
•get visitors to forward a link to your site (viral marketing)
•Cleaninghunk

11. Chain reaction - link & link again
•Links direct and increase traffic to your site
•Links from trade, press and peers' sites are
references/testimonials
•Links from other sites are as valuable, if not more
so, than search engine results; the reader has
already chosen you from your context

12. Search Engine Optimisation
•Submit your site to engines
•Links improve page ranking - be promiscuous
•Syndicate content if you can. RSS is
increasingly popular; Netvibes/iGoogle
•Markup & metadata - make sure your
developer marks up keywords, page
titles/headings/links etc for usability and SEO

13. Love me - or leave me
Turning your visitors into your readers

14. Hold that thought�
•Remember that online readers
•have no patience
•are notoriously fickle
•are scanners, not readers
•Readers are always looking for content that
will hold their interest, so let them have it

15. Content is...
•�
KING!

16. The implied reader
•The "implied reader" is the (imaginary) person
who will understand and appreciate your
content completely
•When writing content, speak directly and
clearly to this imaginary person
•Clear, concise copy is worth more to your
reader - and to you - than $100,000 of flash
animation

17. Mind-tricks for the non-Jedi
•Memory studies show that:-
•the amount of information that can be held in
short-term memory is small
•organise information into chunks, not hefty
paragraphs
•Use lists and bullet-points, images and diagrams
for illustration, not just decoration
•In lists, put important items at the end and the
beginning to maximise the Serial Positioning
Effect

18. Their loss is your loss
•Lost visitors click elsewhere, so make your site
supremely navigable with:-
•menus to navigate throughout the site
•menus to navigate within pages
•external links open new windows/tabs
•a link to get you home easily
•prominent contact information
•Usability = SEO; properly marked-up headings & page
titles are recorded by search robots
•Use "clean" or easily-remembered URLs/folder-based
navigation, not esoteric file names.

19. Missing you already
Getting readers back for more

20. We'll meet again: getting them coming back
•Repeat visits will give you
•referrals
•a higher potential for business from that visitor
•A readership from which you can create a
community
•The technology for retaining visitors has never
been more sophisticated
•Social bookmarking; delicious and digg
•RSS
•Cookies
•Web 2.0 functionality

21. Consider yourself at home
•Familiarity is a powerful ally. Stay in touch
with your reader using:-
•bookmark this site/post, delicious, digg etc.
•newsletters/member signup
•forums/bulletin boards
•personal services - email/chat
•RSS feeds

22. Content is king!(reprise)
•If you think you haven't any news of your own
•reassess: you may take for granted something that
will be interesting to other people
•comment on someone else's, as long as it makes
sense to do so (ie you have authority)
•Good, interesting and current content will keep your
visitors returning, old content will turn them away. Use
•a blog/news page/rss to keep them updated with news
•a date/time element to show them today's date

23. Further reading
email: simon@institute-of-fundraising.org.uk
Related links are at:
http://delicious.com/institute.of.fundraising
All content in this presentation has been scavenged from online sources
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