Some things I’ve not seen mentioned (though I’ll admit my senile old brain only skimmed)
CONTENT is a very important factor – but it has to be unique content of value… and more important is CHANGING content, as in new content on a regular basis.
Sometimes you can actually go overboard by launching with several pages all at once – if it’s content that people will read once and not need to read again (VERY common) that’s one time traffic… worth no more than a bounce!
While unique content of value – like a reference page with instructions, will often bring people back time and time again… it’s actually a massive investment to make one. Some really good examples are W3Schools (even if it is webrot at this point), the tutorials on HowtoForge, or the content often found on sites like Instructables.
If you can’t do content like that and only have single reads – you need to add them slowly so people keep coming back to see the new ones. /snip While it can actually be the same amount of content, building that habit into the user of visiting regularly can be way more important than any one time flash in the pan.
It’s like a client I had a few years ago who was worried about his graphics poor site having no traffic. He had plenty of content – but it was all static – unchanging, never changing, and once you’d seen all of it, little reason to go back… or if you did it was to just one page. On my advice he just started adding one small extra page a week… within a month he started having ‘regulars’ coming through to see what’s new.
… and NEVER underestimate the power of a forums or the ability for people to comment on your content. Not only is it a great way to keep people coming back just to talk to each-other, it’s also one of the best resources to data-mine your visitors to find out what they want, what improvements they think would help, and to leverage as your own unpaid fact checking staff. “User Generated Content” – there’s a reason it’s taken off so big.
After all, the heart of the Internet is communication between people. Play to that whenever possible!
Also it would help if you took a little time to read up on certain marketing techniques – not the flashy artsy stuff, but the core concepts of things like the seven cornerstones of propaganda, indoctrinational speech, or the methodologies of social engineering. There’s something in the human psyche of most people that makes them hardwired to respond how you want if you know the triggers.
I’ll run down the seven propaganda techniques real quick:
Name calling – that one’s easy, though it can just as easily backfire. REALLY GOOD name calling is subtle using words that on the surface don’t seem good/bad. It’s also NOT just about putting things down, but subtly using words that can promote things in people’s minds. A great example is the fabrications on the FSF’s “Windows 7 sins” website… they’ll use words like “corporate” which you don’t automatically register as name calling; but in todays mindset has a negative connotation with many people. They throw about the word freedom even when it’s the opposite of what they’re promoting – just because it invokes a “feel good” attitude about the topic. The more subtle, the better this one tends to work – something I never really mastered (I fully recognize I’m as subtle as a brick through a plate glass window) but I generally recognize it’s use almost immediately.
Glittering Generalities – vague blanket statements that if you think about them usually aren’t actually supported by any sort of rational thought and as a rule are actually meaningless – but they sound good and feel good, or sound bad and feel bad… that feeling brings us to the next one…
Transfer – The use of symbols, comparisons and rhetoric to take good feelings about something unrelated and “transfer” it to your viewpoint, or to take negative feelings and “transfer” it to what you are arguing against.
An example of both glittering generalities AND transfer from an old 50’s film reel is the phrase “A Real American” being applied to a politician in a campaign… It’s a glittering generality because it’s no less true in fact than his opponent… and it’s transfer because they are trying to exploit your patriotism to increase your favoritism of the candidate.
Testimonial – We all know what testimonials are. Endorsements, typically from someone important, easily recognized, or that engenders a natural trust… – The latter of those plays into the next one too:
Plain Folks – laid back attitude, dressing like the target audience, talking like the target audience, pretending to care about their concerns… You see Testimonials and Plain folks tag team a LOT… And when done en-masse you get:
Bandwagon – I’m doing it, she’s doing it… don’t you wanna be a pepper too? This one plays to the lemming in the majority of people – as it turns out mom was right, if your buddies went and jumped off a cliff… most people it turns out would go do it as well.
Card Stacking – the most insidious and often the hardest to recognize… Because when done properly it reads like a completely unbreakable convincing argument as it presents nothing but facts that support the viewpoint being pushed. That’s easy… Problem is it omits anything that disagrees. Religion prior to the enlightenment was the MASTER of this – actively stamping out anything that disagreed with their agenda. Many people don’t realize that things like book burnings are EXACTLY this type of mind control… but so are things like people saying “there’s less IE users today because it’s share dropped to 48%”. Percentages are an all-time GREAT at pulling this off as the majority of people lack the brain cells to rub together and say “wait, a percentage of what?” – Polling agencies pull this all the time; you want to make a liberalist agenda look popular in a poll, go ask a thousand people on the lower east side of New York City… you want to flip the result around, do it on Manhattan island near the east river. Some polling agencies will even poll 10,000 people, and then reject 9,000 of those as “invalid” keeping the thousand who make their viewpoint stick. “of 1,000 people polled”…
Some of these aren’t easy to do, others are too easy and can lose effectiveness if overdone… but if you can master them, you can effectively shove two fingers up your users nose and drag them wherever you want.
As true masters of it like Joseph Goebbels, Martin Luther King, Ghandi, JFK, Sergei Eisenstein, and countless religious leaders ranging from Pope’s to Cultists have proven time and time again. You master these, and it’s a hop skip and a jump away from being able to convince people that if they dress in purple robes and drink the cyanide laced yogurt, the aliens from behind Haley’s comet will come down and take you to Starbase Koloth.
At which point getting them to visit a website regularly is a piece of cake.
Personally, I just think people have become so superficial in the last 15 years - thanks to Reality TV and YouTube - that people aren’t focused on long-term, serious topics. Everyone wants “instant gratification” and it has to be “entertaining” like talking dogs… I guess I can’t relate to your average consumer and pop-culture in 2011.)