While traffic from the search engines is extremely important to a successful website, still more important are the people you can get to come back to your site. Remember that on average it takes 7 exposures to get someone to buy something. If they only come to your site once, what are your odds of getting that?

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You need your visitors to return.

There are a few ways you can encourage them to do this. Number one is to get people to sign up to your newsletter. Having a good list gives you plenty of chances to sell, as well as to drive traffic back to your website. Have a newsletter signup form clearly visible on every page.

Similarly, you should have an RSS feed on your site. While many people are not yet comfortable with it, others are using RSS feeds without realizing it. So have links to allow people to add your feed to their feed reader, to the Google page, My Yahoo and other popular services. How else will they know what is going on with your website?

You can also make your site easy to bookmark. You can include a link to add your site to a visitor’s Favorites or bookmarks on every page. I would suggest having both a link for the bookmarks that are stored by the browser and for services such as deli.cio.us. You should always make these things easy for your visitors.

But your site should also stand out in the bookmarks or Favorites list. Have a favicon on your site. If you aren’t familiar with these, they are a small image that you can see in the browser bar when you visit a site. It also appears in bookmark files. There are a variety of sites that will make free favicon.ico files for you.

Encouraging comments also helps. This is a big part of why blogs are so popular. It makes it easier for visitors to interact. But don’t just let comments sit there. Answer them! You have to participate too. It also helps if you allow visitors to subscribe to the comments so that they can easily read responses in their email. They may or may not come back to read the comments on your site, but they can know if there’s something interesting going on.

You should keep your site updated frequently. In some niches, the more often you post, the better, while in others posting too often is a waste of time and merely generates information overload. Keep a healthy balance for your topic. The more often it changes, the more you are likely to post.

And of course, know how much to monetize your site. Too much really turns visitors off, but too little limits your income potential. Find the balance that works for you and your visitors.

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