6) Submit Your Site

If it's appropriate for your web site, allow your visitors to submit their web sites to your directory. It will not only keep your visitors longer, but will make them come back to check out theirs and their competitors listings. Make sure that sites submitted are relevant to overall theme of your web site, so not to make it's not just another "dump" of links.

7) Audio Greeting

A great way to entertain your visitors is an audio greeting. It can be a welcome message, or a site tour. Simply download free Real Producer from http://www.realnetworks.com and record your voice. Remind your visitors that they have to have Real Player (http://www.real.com) to listen to your audio message.

8) Flash Movie

Animated movies are a terrific way of pulling your visitors into your web site. And now with CoffeeCup's Firestarter, you can make your own Flash animation in minutes! Just go to http://www.coffeecup.com and download their free version. Open program, enter some text, add a few animation effects and create a web page - all won't take you more than 20 minutes.

9) Take a quiz

A quiz is a fun and informative way of keeping your visitors on your site. Creating a quiz is easy - just come up with 10-20 questions related to theme of your web site. Then go to free web tools such as http://www.alxnet.com/services/quiz and sign up for their quiz services. When they give you HTML code, insert it into your web page. That's it! You can find more web sites that offer free quiz tool by searching Google.com for "quiz for a web site".

10) Staff Introduction

I always like reading about people behind a web site. Some stories are so funny and ridiculous, that it's impossible to stop reading. Have a photograph and a fun story about everyone who is a part of your web business. And if you are a one-person business, tell a funny and creative story about yourself. Pretend you are on a stage and every sentence you say has to make your audience laugh. Well, at least that always works for me :-)

In addition, RealNetworks has a nasty reputation of releasing spyware. There have been many reports, most especially from highly respected Steve Gibson of grc.com (http://www.grc.com). It makes me very nervous to install a product such as Real Player, then find Zone Alarm asking me lots of questions about whether or not it can access internet. According to RealNetworks, their product is not spyware since uses of data are fully spelled out in privacy policy. Let me just point out that their privacy policy is, I'm sure, very complete - document is 187kb in size!

I visited web site recently (http://www.real.com) and found that it's very different from one I saw years ago. It's obvious that some marketing people have been hard at work. For example, it used to be that you could find mention of free version of player directly on front page, brilliantly displayed. Now I had to search for over 15 minutes until I found a link to earlier version available for free (I got distinct impression that newer versions are not free).

I also have a problem with download and installation procedures that ask me to purchase additional products (lots of them) by default (I have to turn them off explicitly), ask for too many options about what they can do and seem to be trying much to hard to sell me additional things constantly. I'm sorry, all I want to do is download silly player so I can see that Osama Bin Laden video, not purchase a gold subscription to this and access to that, and oh yes, can they send me this and that and this and that? Jeez.

As a webmaster, I cannot say that I would feel comfortable putting Real video and audio content onto my site. While technology is sound and works well, I think I'll stick with formats which do not require so much work and so many decisions on part of my audience.