Get Visitors Returning To Your Site Again & Again

Oct 14
18:08

2006

Diane Hughes

Diane Hughes

  • Share this article on Facebook
  • Share this article on Twitter
  • Share this article on Linkedin

One of the driving forces of entrepreneurs is the insatiable need for traffic. Do you stay awake at night wondering how you can get more traffic to your website? Most online business owners do!

mediaimage
Who can blame you? After all,Get Visitors Returning To Your Site Again & Again Articles the "great and mighty" Google.com can make a simple statement and suddenly millions of web sites are redesigned in a flurry of activity to comply! Consider, for example, how many times you've run your web content through a keyword analyzer! Or how often you've wondered exactly what an "authoritative" site is.

One SEO strategy that many people know to be a valuable is the call for fresh content. And although we can be critical of Google's all-powerful hand making sweeping decisions about web sites, we can understand why they would rate fresh sites higher than stale sites.

So how do you get a fresh site? What ideas can you use to revive, recycle, reuse, and reinvigorate the material you have to have it appear as "fresh"? After all, if you're like some small business owners, there are only so many times you can write the same thing over and over! And every entrepreneur will tell you that there simply aren't enough hours in the day to create fresh content.

Enter RSS feeds. Now, I'm not going to get technical here. I'm here to help you grow your business, not to educate you on the in's-and-out's of computer jargon. So here's the "thumbnail" version of RSS feeds:

RSS feeds are something you offer to people as a subscription. It's just a file that people can subscribe to. Now, no one actually cares about the RSS file itself, but they're interested in what's attached to it: your audio, digital, or text file. Every time you create a new one, it gets sent to them automatically, like a free, online magazine subscription. Although it's changing, RSS feeds require an aggregator (which is a piece of software that checks the RSS feed every time you're online and fetches the updated file if there is one).

(Note to all the techies out there: yes, there is more to it than that, but that's good enough to get my point across!)So how can RSS help you? I think RSS feeds can help you in 2 ways.

First, by offering an RSS feed, you can get subscribers to get updated information from you on a regular basis... every time you create it.

"But Diane," you say to me, "this doesn't solve my problem of trying to create fresh content on a regular basis.

"Here's my response: That's true, but consider this: are you doing other things to help your business... such as blog content, newsletters, or article submissions to third party article hosts? If you are, you can attach these to an RSS feed and post it on your site!That accomplishes several things: it keeps your name in front of your subscribers all the time. It's better than just having a newsletter because it allows you to provide multiple media opportunities to demonstrate your expertise and show them how your product solves their needs. And, it allows you to "multitask" with the fresh content you're already creating for your other media. Also, new links help create fresh content that you were using anyway!But that's not the only way you can use RSS feeds for success. There's a second way that I think can be an even more powerful way to use feeds.

If you go to a site like http:

//www.originotions.com they offer free code that you can put on your site. This code acts as an aggregator. So YOU can sign up for a feed that is related to the content on your site. (For example, if you sell dog food online, you should sign up for a feed that gives people all the latest in "doggie news.

")So what happens? This valuable news is posted on your site in a little window and is updated each time something new happens. You can also set the number of news items posted. The result is that you'll get continuous, fresh content that is keyword rich and helpful to your niche so it can draw people to your site more frequently!This will help set you up as an authoritative site, boost your rankings, and bring people to your site who are looking for that information!For my money, it's one of the smartest tools out there to help you.