The Internet is more dead air than noise, a house of a trillion dusty, forgotten rooms that have long since lost the appeal that kept them brightly-lit and crowded, or which never had it in the first place. Sure, hubs like Amazon and Facebook are blinding points of light in that dark sea, but the truth is that almost every page of every site on the Internet is a tomb, a haunted house left abandoned and ignored. So what determines who gets traffic and who doesn’t, and how, if you see your site’s stats slipping or are having trouble attracting an audience, can you buck the trend?
Source: doubtfulnews.com
Site Construction
Is there anything to do on your site? If so, is it immediately clear how one might go about doing it? There should be nothing between users and your site’s functionality, and if there is, it could be part of the reason your traffic is suffering. Every step between navigating to a site and doing whatever that site ostensibly exists for is another chance for users to get bored, frustrated, or distracted and click away to something else.
Information formatting is another crucial factor. If your site’s copy doesn’t flow, if it’s rendered in big, chunky blocks of text with nothing to break them up or differentiate them, people just won’t read it. You want a quick, tight paragraph leading into bullet points and interrupted only occasionally by additional paragraphs, and you want the whole thing to focus directly on the essentials.
Marketing Outreach
Chasing garbage leads is a great way to tank your traffic numbers. If you’re directing your marketing campaigns at fake accounts, or worse, at spamtraps and bots, then not only are you wasting your efforts, but you could be endangering your site. Bot traffic can flood servers and slow websites down until they run like molasses, which is guaranteed to drive real traffic far away. You’ve gotta advertise; outreach is a major part of fueling growth, but you’ve gotta be careful about how you do it.
Deal selectively when buying leads. Find a merchant who’s accountable for their wares and transparent about their business practices and the frequency with which they scrub their lists for bots and other nuisances. Even if you’re paying more for less, knowing that you’re targeting your ads at actual flesh-and-blood human beings is worth it.
Source: abandonedexplorers.com
Social Media
An active social media presence is a necessity these days. Not only do you need to maintain a running account of promotions and company news, but you also need to engage with your customers and inject a little humanity into your public persona. That human connection is at the center of all advertisement, an implicit promise that at the end of the day, this is one person selling something to another, and being able to put a face and a voice to the experience helps users feel confident in the relationship.
The best way to remain a warm, well-lit place for users to interact and engage is to make that human connection a part of your company’s ethos. Clean, simple business practices, a solid interface, and a winning personality draw traffic and stave off the haunted house syndrome that devours so many failed sites.
Source: mlkshk.com
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