Attracting visitors to your WordPress website is just the first step towards success. To truly succeed, you need to cultivate a loyal audience of repeat visitors. There are many ways to achieve this, depending on the type of site you have. In this article, we’ll explore some strategies and tactics that can help you develop a loyal audience of repeat visitors.
Membership Sites
One of the most effective ways to encourage regular visitors to your site is to add a membership component to it. Membership sites work on the premise that visitors have to join to see the content. Membership can be free, but charging a fee is well worth considering to encourage return visitors and make your site profitable. Restrict Content Pro is a premium WordPress plugin that gives you all the tools you need to build a membership site. This plugin allows you to charge people to view particular content and offers multiple membership levels, so you can cater to the different needs of your audience.
Get Social with BuddyPress
If you want to build a community of like-minded thinkers engaging on your site, then you might want to opt for BuddyPress. A free WordPress plugin, BuddyPress helps you add many social networking features to your website. By installing BuddyPress, members can create their own profiles and you can set up user groups, messaging, activity streams and much more. This encourages a community to emerge and become active on your site, enabling people to discuss and share thoughts and information on a particular topic or niche.
The Importance of a Mailing List
Mailing lists are essential for all websites wanting to build a following. Once you have someone’s email, you can keep in contact with them and begin to build a rapport. By sending out emails, it reminds your visitors of your site and keeps them updated with any new and interesting content you have added, that otherwise they may not know about. It is important to bear in mind that if you want regular visitors, then you need to be sending out regular emails. MailChimp is a freemium email marketing tool that will collect, store mailing addresses and send out your emails automatically or whenever you have something to say.
Using Webinars to Remind Visitors to Return to Your Site
Webinars are an extremely useful tool to remind people to return regularly to your site. By scheduling webinars, people will have a fixed date to visit your site and a specific reason to do so. WebinarsOnAir is a powerful option for hosting webinars. This solution offers automated webinars, options for paid webinars, live chats, and questions, as well as much more. BuddyPress works well with webinars, as visitors can then stay on your site, or return throughout the week, using the BuddyPress forums to discuss the topic of, or the questions in, your webinar.
Want Regular Visitors? Run Regular Promotions
Promotions have been proven time and time again to be a very successful way to encourage visitors to your site. By running regular promotions, you’ll have a better chance of getting your target audience to return multiple times. So, instead of running one big promotion, try smaller but more regular offers. WooCommerce Promotion Manager is a popular WordPress plugin that you can use to set up promotional campaigns. This plugin allows you to select sale products, times, and dates of promotions and will display slideshow banners to advertise your promotions.
People Love Competitions
A competition is another way that has been proven to drive more traffic to your site. The Photo Contest WordPress plugin is a good option, as it encourages people to share photographs. Whatever type you choose, think carefully about the competition and monitor it closely. It may be that you need to run a series of competitions, so you aren’t just attracting new visitors with one competition, but encouraging returnees with further possibilities of winning something.
Final Thoughts
There are many ideas in this article to help increase the number of regular visitors you receive to your site. Define what type of site you have and think carefully about what options will best suit you. Whatever you choose, make sure you monitor it. Creating a regular audience is hard work and an ongoing job, but one that is definitely worth it.
