A common problem for sites these days is maintaining a steady stream of repeat visitors.  There are many reasons why your visitors might not ever come back to your site: you don’t have good content, you don’t have what the visitor was looking for, you have design flaws, your server is slow, it’s hard to find your site, etc. etc.  There are many explanations as to why your site is not getting repeat visitors.  Most of these reasons can be controlled and there are many things you can do to increase the amount of visitors that will re-visit your site.

The most common reason why people don’t come back is because they forget about you!  Why does Google get a lot of visitors? A big part is because people are trying to find a site that they once visited but forgot the address.  So, how can you keep interested visitors from forgetting about you?  Start a mailing list!

Mailing lists are good because everyone has email and most people check it on a daily basis.  It is the best way for you, as a website owner, to keep your visitors coming back.

So what kind of content should you put in your mailing list?  A good idea is to put links to new products or new content.  Perhaps you should offer premium content or incentives to newsletter subscribers so they have a good reason to join your list.  (You should also have an unsubscribe method in every email… otherwise you might get in trouble for SPAM)

How do you start a newsletter?  You will need a newsletter host.  A Google search returns thousands of results, so that might be a good place to start. You might also be able to set up a script on your own server or web host to handle the newsletter.

In order get subscribers, you can put up a simple form in a noticeable spot on your site to collect email addresses.  This is probably the most common way.  Another thing that a lot of people do is when a user registers for something on their site, they have a check box saying something like “Check here to receive emails from us.”

Once you get everything set up, you should send emails on a frequent basis and make the email titles appealing so that when people see your email they will click it.  Having an email list is recommended for every site owner because not only is it a good way to “keep” your visitors, but it can also produce some good results because all the visitors are targeted.