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Guestbook This is simply a place where your visitors can leave their thoughts and opinions.
Forum This is a more interactive approach, where someone can start a thread and other visitors reply to
posting in an ongoing fashion. This also a great thing to have if you offer more technical or specialized services, so that your customers can ask you about any technical problems they are having and might even find answer in a previous posting.
Chat Most of us know that chat rooms can be highly addictive and most online surfers at one point has participated in some kind of chat. You can provide a cat room for either social purposes (like an online dating site) or for customer service issues, where visitor can have live help via a chat with a customer service rep.
5. Free Articles
People love free stuff. Even if it’s as simple as a collection of industry related articles. If you owned a diet and nutrition company, offering free recipes and articles on weight loss would boost your traffic by getting them to return to your site for more info. It’s important to use only relevant material to your website services or products or you will just confuse or irritate your visitor.
You can either write articles yourself or gather articles from article content sites. Make sure you always include author’s credits at end so you are not stealing articles. Here are a few good sites that offer articles on a huge variety of topics.
Article Central - A large directory of almost 4000 articles for webmasters. http://thewhir.com/find/articlecentral/
Constant Content - Download articles, tutorials, and product reviews for your web site. Everything you need to construct a finished website. You can request article subject matter and even get custom articles written just for your web site. http://www.constant-content.com/
EzineArticles.com - Free content for your ezine or website from a variety of popular categories. http://www.ezinearticles.com/
Another good way to gain exposure for your website and start gaining respect and credibility is to write your own articles and submit them to these kinds of sites. There is always a link to author’s website with their name at end or beginning of each article. It is a great way to add traffic and potentially increase your sales.
6. Membership Sites
There are two kinds of membership sites, free and paid. Free membership sites are usually websites that are tailored to give you content based on your profile and interests. It changes constantly and most people that sign up for a site like this come back to see whats new they can read about.
If you are an expert in your field of expertise and have enough good growing and updated content, you should look into making a paid members version of your website. You could even have a joint venture and offer a wealth of information only available to paid subscriptions.
There are still more ways you can add content to your site, like cartoons, games, quotes or sayings of day. With a good search on internet you should be able to come up with lots of free content to make your website a place where your customers love to come back and visit.
Remember that most internet consumers, first and foremost, are looking for free information before they are looking to buy anything. Make your site filled with relevant information and they will be more likely to come back and buy from a site they trust.
Leah West
http://www.westmarketing-design.com Providing complete search engine optimized website design and internet marketing services for your small business success.
Sign up for my Free ezine at http://www.westmarketing-design.com/ezinesubscribe.htm
