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Michael J. Miller
Need to get noticed? Here's how to make your Web site sticky

Michael J. Miller
Editor-In-Chief PC Magazine
Monday, February 12, 2001
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If you've got a Web site, your aim has to be making it "sticky." Roughly defined, stickiness is the ability of a site to make visitors stay when they're there and come back when they're not.

One way to increase stickiness is by adding well-chosen extras or finishing touches. These touches include features such as site search, maps, chat, discussion boards, syndicated content, and affiliate banner ads.

PC Magazine recently combed the Internet looking for Web enhancements that provide just the right finishing touches your site may need, and we found a great many. Click for more.

In the end, we divided the finishing touches into four categories that will be especially useful to commercial sites: Finding, Communicating, Informing, and Profiting. For each category, we take in-depth looks at some representative services.

FINDING
The Finding section looks at add-ons that give visitors a way to locate something using your site. This can mean either finding information on your site via site search, or locating places in the physical, rather than cyber, world through geographical maps.

COMMUNICATING
You'll find a wide array of communications tools, ranging from e-mail services to online calendars. Other information-management applications include chat, instant messaging, bulletin boards, polling tools, and many others designed for communication and information exchange among users.

INFORMING
Another great way to ensure that visitors come back to your site often is by continually informing them. You can do this through updated syndicated content that keeps them abreast of happenings in their areas of interest. For instance, there are a number of services that provide news feeds in a variety of different fields, but particularly in those that focus on business concerns. Typically, you can get a limited, but useful, free news feed to your site, which the service updates over a 24-hour period. But if you want a fully tailored service, you'll need to subscribe to these services--sometimes at a considerable cost.

PROFITING
Ultimately, you're in business for the purpose of profiting. To help you do this, several sites offer affiliate marketing services, in which you provide banner ads on your site that link to merchants and their products related to your focus. When your visitors click to these links and purchase products, you receive a percentage of the sale, and the service keeps track of all the information necessary to pay you your commission and monitor customer activity.

Making your Web site sticky is a huge topic, but these four areas provide a great start. Remember, it's often the finishing touches that separate the professional from the amateur.

Do you have other ideas about how to make a Web site more sticky? Do you have any examples of sites that draw you back, again and again? What do they do well that others do badly? TalkBack to me.

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