When you use involvement devices to get more interaction with your website from your visitors, you begin to notice they stay at your site longer. This is called making your site more “sticky” because your visitors are “sticking” to your site for more time than before. One simple tip you can test at your website is adding a “free tool” which can be used directly by your visitors to help them do something related to what you know they’re interested in achieving.
The ingenious use of this strategy
One particularly ingenious use of this strategy is to relate the tool to the desired results achieved from using your products or services. This not only gets more involvement from the user at your site but also can result in that visitor recommending your site to others in your market just to use the tool!
Do you see how this works? They may decide to share this tool via email to their friends or business associates so they can quickly calculate their own returns on investment and the ball begins rolling even more with more unique visitors and referrals who may be more likely to do business at the site than someone who just came cold with no introduction or reason for visiting in advance perchance.
Another type of tools
There are other types of these tools and involvement devices which you can use to make your site more sticky and get more word of mouth referrals too, but I still maintain the more you can tie in the “reason of being” of the tool to the end benefits of your website visitors’ use of your products or services, the more of your products and services you will sell to your website visitors and they’re referrals as a direct result.
Let me give you a quick example. If you visit who is a professional copywriting coach, you’ll notice at the upper left of his website, there is a direct response calculator that helps people calculate the returns on investment of a direct marketing campaign. Naturally, after seeing how much they can earn from a campaign, visitors will want to contact the owner of the website to create the campaign for them!
Some other examples of these involvement devices could be puzzles, quizzes, income projection estimators, a free video, audio or short report as an incentive for referring other visitors or even polls, surveys or the opportunity to bookmark your website.
In fact, to drive this point home, you can look at most article directories and find a mechanism to send this article to a friend either by email or just by sharing it with your friends on a social network.
The bottom line is you can test using these types of devices and see how your own response may improve.
