Ash HN: Best way to drive repeat visitors to content site

1 point·aruanavekar··4 comments

how to build visitor attachment? - Email subscription (newsletter) - prompt to bookmark site

If you are hosting good and useful content, how to ensure the readers are tagging you to keep coming back to consume content?

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Keep everything concise and to the point. If you can explain what you're writing about in 500 words, don't stretch it out to 1,500 words. If a video can walk a viewer through something in three minutes, don't make it a 10 minute video. Wherever possible, try not to wrap what you're posting in a story if it doesn't make sense to wrap it in a story. Doing that can seem forced.

And try to limit the SEO. Jamming SEO keywords into anything is really annoying to a reader.

Make sure that what you're posting is useful and well written. Don't stuff it with keywords. Write it for people, not algorithms. And don't call it content. That just makes it sound like something hacked together quickly and which will have a short shelf life.

As another poster pointed out, don't be obnoxious. Stay away from large ads, popups, flyouts, and all of that crap that just annoys the heck out of visitors.

This is crucial: don't be obnoxious.

When I go to a site, and get besieged with popups, videos, and a thousand other things clutching at my attention, I leave and never return. Keep the site clean, accessible, and considerate to your readers. Don't let desperation get in the way of the content.

Anecdotally, the sites I go back to frequently are those that have new stuff on them frequently.

Examples include… Hacker News. News sites. Twitter.

Of course, having a lot of new relevant stuff every day requires either social use at scale, or an editorial team. Not cheap.

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