The most important visitor to come to your website is the return visitor. This is the individual who had seen your site before and decided it was worth coming back to.
What makes this person so valuable is that they provide free traffic to your website. Without you having to do anything they come back to see what’s new.
The return visitor is far more likely to retweet a blog post or send it to stumble upon. This will result in more traffic for you.
The return visitor will leave comments on your posts and give you feedback.
The return visitor will ask questions. This is important because it helps you know what you should write about for your blog. It gives you special insight into the needs of your visitors. You can use this insight to select better advertising for your website.
The return visitor will answer other peoples questions on your blog.
The return visitor feels like they know you in some capacity and will trust you. They are far more likely to buy a product that you recommend then someone who is coming to your website for the first time.
So what are you doing to encourage first-time visitors to come back and be return visitors?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I understand the importance of repeat visitors, but I'm curious as to whether you would say that they are essential for every website. For example, say your website is selling a particular product by offering a review of it, once a person has read the review and either bought, or not bought, that product would you expect them to return? Should every website have a means to attract visitors back such as a forum? Or are some websites always going to be more suited to return visitors than others?
Thanks again for the useful titbits, I'm certainly going to have a think about how best I can draw visitors back to my websites.
I started to write a response to this comment and realized that it was getting kind of long and I should turn into a blog post. Thanks for the inspiration! You can read my response to your question in this blog post: http://nickstraffictricks.com/2262_why-you-need-r…