www.BreakingOut.NET » How to Retain Your Visitors

Maybe being a little tongue-in-cheek I should call this “How NOT to retain your visitors”

But I think that it’s actually specifically relevant to retaining your visitor traffic…

Someone remarked to me recently that I mention and link to other websites too often on BreakingOut.NET and that this is something I shouldn’t be doing.

In his view, I shouldn’t be giving people the chance to go and visit other peoples sites. Because if I do that then I’ve lost traffic and with that lost the chance to make sales and earn revenue. Instead I should be aiming to keep my visitors on my own site and discourage them from roaming off elsewhere.

I’ve been aware of this argument for some time now and I’ve been giving it some further thought. And I’ve come to the decision that I’m not going to change my approach here.

They call it “leakage” in the trade. The idea that if you give people a “way out”, an exit, an external link to another site, then that’s a bad thing. You should instead be aiming for “retention”.

Now it depends precisely what you are focussing on at any one particular time and with any one particular page or website. If we’re talking about a landing page, a “squeeze” page or a sales page, then it probably isn’t going to make much sense for it to include a link to the competition or to Farmville or something (unless you’re an affiliate for Farmville).

But other than that, in “normal blogging circumstances”, I see no reason why I shouldn’t acknowledge the existence of other websites as well as my own. The world and the web is a vast place. We all know that. And one of the reasons I like to use the web is to discover what’s out there. The web is precisely that – an interconnecting network of sites criss-crossing and interlinking all over the place. That’s part of the appeal of the web and that’s also the value of it.

There’s no point in me pretending that I’m the only guy out there in my field. My field of interest and focus, my niche, doesn’t just include me. There’s a vast amount of stuff available and my aim is to help people find their way around it and to discover what’s out there.

“But what if they don’t come back?”

We might as well recognize and accept this fact: people will always choose to visit those sites that give them the most value. And if a site gives them value, then they will return to it. And if it doesn’t, then they won’t. And f you aren’t giving them the value they are seeking, if you aren’t giving them a reason to visit your site, then no amount of worrying about whether or not they are going to come back is going to help you. You’re focussing on the wrong issue here.

In any case, I’m not going to fret about trying to keep people from also going elsewhere. That’s completely the wrong way of looking at it.

I personally do not want to visit websites which try to pretend that they are the only people on the planet. People like MSN Network and Compuserve tried that in the 1990s. These two were amongst the biggest players online for a while back then.

They wanted to keep people in their “walled garden”. It didn’t work. How many people have a Compuserve account nowadays? Who even knows who they are?

The web, and especially blogging, is a dialogue between people. The smart thing to do is to recognise, accept and embrace this fact and join the dialogue.

People never just visit one website when they are sitting at their computer. They will go away from your site and visit others. It’s a fact of life on the net. They will even, horror of horrors, switch the computer off at some stage and go off and do something else. What if they don’t come back? What if they don’t switch the computer back on?

You can never confine people

You can’t retain visitors by trying to confine them. You can never wall people in. So don’t pretend you can. Confinement never works. If anything it’s actually more likely to make people suspicious and cause them to rebel against it. I for one especially hate confinement. It’s not what I want in life. Indeed it’s part of the whole reason that I went in for breaking out and starting this very website in the first place. So I’m not going to do anything which smacks of confinement for my readers.

It’s a bit like having a cat. I don’t actually have a cat, but I know people who do have cats. Assuming for the moment your cat isn’t an “indoor” cat, one who’s been brought up solely indoors, perhaps because you live in an apartment, or because you live in a urbanised area with heavy traffic or whatever.

Embrace freedom on the web!

Apart from these exceptions, the chances are you will let your cat out to roam in the garden – and for that matter in next doors garden (try controlling where a cat wants to roam – you can’t do it) – and in and around the neighbouring area. You have to trust that your cat will come back.

And sure enough it will. When it’s dinner time apart from anything else. Even if you live in a high-rise apartment, you will have to leave most or all of the doors to the rooms in your apartment open so your cat can roam in and out whenever it wants to check its revier. It’s normal cat behaviour to check everything out regularly. If you don’t, then chances are your cat will protest. One way or the other.

And so it is with us humans and the web. We like to check everything out – and we aren’t going to let anyone stop us.

So the smart thing is to accept this and turn it to your own benefit. Don’t worry about linking to other people’s sites. Actively help people find their way around. Chances are they’ll appreciate it and they’ll thank you for it. Retain your visitors by letting them out to roam free. Like your cat, they’ll almost certainly come back.

And if there’s a bit of “leakage” along the way, so what. Live with it. There will always be new visitors coming along. Provided you make them welcome and that you make sure you always have something of value to offer.