One important question to ask yourself when developing any new business idea or website is this:
What’s going to make my visitors come back for more? Finding the answer to this question is essential for success on every level.
A long term profit strategy requires a solid understanding what drives your visitors to return to your website repeatedly. And what makes them want to recommend your website to others.
Think of it like a restaurant. Imagine visiting it for the first time. It’s quite easy to pinpoint what makes you want to return to it. Some of these factors include the taste of the food, the prices, quality of service, ambiance and the type of people who frequent the place as well. If it is crowded and exciting or quiet and dull.
When combined together, these elements make you decide whether or not to return for another visit. If you experienced bad food, horrible service and a high priced menu, you would probably not visit the restaurant again or recommend it to others.
If you had great food but bad service and reasonable prices, you might still return to the restaurant one or two more times, to satiate your culinary desires.
The Difficulty in Satisfying All Your Visitors or Customers
While you can clearly identify the factors which provoke you to accept or reject a restaurant, it is considerably more difficult to second guess the intentions of visitors who arrive in hordes daily to your website or online storefront.
How do they prioritize the factors which encourage a repeat visit? What makes them linger? What makes them click away? It’s essentially impossible to understand how every visitor thinks or feels about your site.
There will be some who find your website amazingly useful and others who will find incredibly dull and redundant. Everyone has different levels of knowledge and its difficult to consistently write for some and still please everyone else.
So what do you do? If it was up to me, I would cater to the masses by producing products or content which receive the most attention. String them along and build your audience size. Gradually introduce content that builds on what they already know or are familiar with.
The means producing layers of information: primers for newbies, budget design services, popular souvenir products. Move up the scale and you’ll have handbooks for advanced users, design consultations and vintage collectors items.
Eventually the critical mass you’ve developed will allow you to split into smaller, specialized niches or fulfill the needs of specific customers through a specific section of your site. It’s easy to put up another sub-domain or directory to re-capture focus.
Developing an Idea into a Profitable Business Model
I recently spent some time developing some new websites (some of which you may come to know soon) and never really did feel at ease with several ideas I had in mind, even though they were unique and fulfilled a current market need.
A great concept is only truly profitable when you have a game plan for getting return traffic, return customers and long term supporters. You can put out an idea and make a splashy launch to bait attention. But if that is all you have, you’re not going to make it lucrative in the long run.
In many cases, I have dropped ideas that seemed great on paper because I couldn’t answer the question of how I would be able to innovate and make visitors return consistently to my website, especially when it exists in a crowded niche.
Your competitor has survived for a reason. Find out why people repeatedly return to their website. Why they trust their brand. Everything your competitor has marks the bare minimum that you must achieve. But you must go further and top your competitor in order to stand out and turn a greater profit.
Ways to Get People To Revisit Your Website: A Checklist
This is a simple checklist because as I’ve mentioned earlier, no method is bullet proof and defensible enough against hundreds of new and shifting visitor perceptions.
User perspectives are constantly shifting as they absorb more information from your competitors or elsewhere in their personal lives.
- Are your product or service prices competitive?
- Is your site populated enough to encourage participation?
- How does your site feel to 10 random people who have never visited it?
- Have you made usability and customer value a main focus for your site?
- What is the perceived quality of your product/content? Examine the feedback.
- Are you providing information that is coherent with your search keywords?
- Do you celebrate, flatter or please your customers through your site?
- Are you providing open channels for complaints and feedback?
- Are users encouraged to interact with one another through your site features?
- Do you offer an online service or tool that cannot be replicated elsewhere?
- Is information continuously updated to fulfill visitor desires and needs?
- Does your website project a unique, familiar and identifiable voice?
- Does your business fulfill its mission statement or promise to the public?
Successfully answering these questions would then provide you with a higher potential for attracting repeat traffic, attention and sales from visitors to your site.
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