What keeps you going back to the same website? Is the content fresh and insightful? Can you contribute to the site and feel involved with a community? Does the site provide you benefits, gifts, sales for your loyalty?

Think about your website. Provide similar rewards to your visitors, and you'll attract the same people that draws you to other sites. Before you can embark on a plan, you have to understand your visitor base. Researching the pages they visit on your website, returning visitors, and their traffic patterns can provide some insight into what they may be looking to get out of your website. Soliciting feedback is another method to find out directly what they want. You can open a dialog and get a deeper knowledge of their expectations. Once you have analyzed what they would like, you can then find ways to deliver on their needs.

Keep Your Content Fresh and Insightful

Regular updates to your website makes your news part of the visitors' regular routines. Your website could be updated every day, every week, or at least every month. Schedule the updates to occur at predictable intervals, so visitors can rely on the schedule to know when new information will be available to them. Many content management systems provide a field where you can designate a specific date and time when the information will be available. This way, you can enter a lot of information at one time, and release it to meet the periodic cycles. When visitors to your site can count on meaningful information posted at regular intervals, they will return to your site to see your next posting.

Community Involvement

Social networking sites encourage visitors to engage themselves in the online community. For those who love to express themselves, websites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, etc. provide channels for people to participate in a two-way conversation. Not all social networking sites are the same. Some focus on particular areas of interest, others focus on short announcements or lengthy blogs, others are for advertising particular news content or media types (images, video, audio). For a list of the common social networking sites, visit Wikipedia.

Other ways to get visitor involvement is to run your own blog or bulletin board. A blog is short for "web log", which provides people a channel to express their ideas and views. Usually select people publish a blog to a website to provide focused channels of discourse. Typically there is a comments section for visitors to add their responses to the posts.

A bulletin board is more open than a blog, allowing members to contribute to topic areas, called forums. Often these forums are moderated by one or more administrator to ensure the members follow the posting guidelines. Members can contribute messages to forums, and respond to other members' messages. So long as contributions are regularly made to the board, it can be a lively center for discussion.

Rewarding Loyalty

If your website has a shopping feature, you can track spending habits of your visitors. Acquiring and analyzing this information can help you identify shopping trends of particular shoppers, and predict sales trends for your base clientele. By knowing when your visitors will purchase certain products, you can prepare your stock accordingly. Providing your loyal customers with discounts for the items you know they will buy will attract them to your website to complete the purchase. Only by gathering all sales receipts and tying them to specific customers can you help tie their need for products with your desire to sell it to them. You are not preying on your customers when you track their purchase trends, you are enabling both parties in the transaction to benefit from the deal.

Summary

By understanding the motivations of your visitors, you can find the triggers that will get them to return. It all starts by tracking their usage of your site and gathering feedback from them.