How To Make Your Site Sticky? at 27.1.11 Posted by Munish Singla

If you want to brand either yourself or your site one of your most important goals is to keep your readers returning to your site time after time. You want them to hang on your every word. You want them to be a little excited when they see a new post pop up in their feed reader. I know from the sites I follow when I see a new post on my feed reader I jump straight on that site and I do that because I know that they produce great content.
As long as you run a content centric site one of the best ways you can keep people coming back is to produce great content. I don’t think it’s really what you produce as long as it’s worthwhile to that audience you will see people returning time after time. I think one of my favorite sites that typify this theory is passiveaggressivenotes.com.  This site is basically a compilation of scanned notes from angry people, there is nothing here that should really make me want to return every day, but it’s funny stuff so I know whenever I go there I’ll get a laugh and that is why I keep returning.
Once you can consistently craft killer content that your readers like and you know they like because they are bookmarking, retweeting and stumbling it. So now you know they like what you are producing chances are they will want to read more. So you job now is to make it as easy as possible for them to keep coming back. RSS feeds will help do this. If building a following is the most important thing to you, then sacrifice some of your advertising space and add your subscription button. Drop your best converting ad panels and replace them with your subscriptions buttons. I’ve found above or below each post or the top right hand corner works best.
Just a quick note on the layout of the RSS feeds, I prefer to go with just a teaser and let them come to your site to read the full post, if people want to read the full post from their feed reader they’ll let you know, then look at changing it.
There a raft of small tips tweaks and changes that you can make that will have a dramatic effect on the rate of your returning visitors, they’re not wide scale changes but they all help to make a difference.
Interact with your audience; It’s stupid one, but replying to comments, giving advice and your opinion will always work well.
Use teasers in your side bars and below your posts, most popular posts, most commented and most liked will keep them clicking through your site.
Add a Q&A section to your site, if someone has a question you can be the one to answer it.
Keeps your site running smoothly, quick load times along with a fresh design and layout can give the feeling of a brand new site instead of one that you have trudged through before.
If you want to keep the same visitors coming back time and time again then you have to focus heavily on your content, it’s what brings them to the site in the first place and if you do it right it’s what will keep them coming back again and again. There are also some knock on effects, good sites will always find their way into the social media channels, traffic has a tendency to spike when this happens, but if these new visitors like what they see, they’ll be back and who knows maybe one day you won’t even need to worry about Google and what it can do for your site.