Secrets to Creating A Sticky Web Page that Captivates Your Visitors

Having a website alone is no guarantee that you will get any business if your site is lousy. If you want visitors to stick around once they land on your website, your website better be sticky and engaging. Nowadays, people have so much distractions – The TV, Facebook, Youtube, Iphone, Ipod, not to mention other competing websites! You only have a few seconds to captivate your visitors’ attention when they land on your site.

If you fail to make a strong impression or fail to engage them instantly, they will quickly hit the back button and look for something else!

So how can you make your site more sticky and engaging? Follow these rules:

Create an Attractive and Professional Looking Design

You only have less than 5 seconds to make an impression on your visitors. As such, the look and feel of your site must instantly convey professionalism and trust when visitors first land on your site. Follow these tips to ensure your site has an attractive and professional look and feel:

• Have a professionally designed logo – The logo represents your brand and your image. Therefore, make sure you invest some money to hire a professional graphic designer to design a logo for your business.  The logo should be positioned on the upper left corner of the header section.
• Use maximum of 3-4 colors for your color scheme – Use 2 dominant colors for your site features and 2 colors for background and Call to Action buttons. Keeping the number of colors to a minimum of 3-4 make your site more pleasing to look at. Also, make sure the colors go well together. You can refer to the site colourlovers.com for suggested color schemes.
• Use high quality, crisp, and professional looking photos or images that are relevant to the content. Images and graphics make your content more interesting and captivating. Just make sure the images or photos are relevant to the content.
• Have enough white spaces around the important elements – White space provides breathing area for your site and makes your site looks cleaner.
• Use a clean, simple layout – Find inspiration from Apple. Apple is the expert at using clean and simple, yet elegant designs. Simple isn’t necessarily easy. Creating something that is simple can be a challenge as we naturally want to throw the whole kitchen sink into a design. Resist that urge and only show what’s necessary. Also, stick to a 2 column layout. 3 column layout design can overwhelm the visitors.

Let Visitors Know They Are in the Right Place

When the visitors land on your site, they want to know right away whether you have what they are looking for. If your site is not clear on what you offer, they will bounce right away. Follow these tips to help visitors know they are in the right place:

• Have a tagline – A tagline is a branding element that succintly summarizes what your site offers to your visitor. A tagline should be short and located beneath the logo.
• Have a powerful headline near the top of the page that conveys what values you offer to your visitors.
• Include a short paragraph to explain what your business do and who your target customers are on the top of the page. Also, include a few bullet points on the top to convey the features,  benefits, and value proposition of your products or services.

Establish Trust and Credibility

Visitors are always waried of spams and unscrupulous sites. They would only engage with you and follow you if you are trustworthy and credible. To establish trust and credibility, you must include the following trust elements on your site:

• Show customer testimonials and/or case studies – Social proof is the best way to establish your credibility. If you’re good at what you do, then prove it by showing your clients’ testimonials or case studies. Video testimonials are the best. If not, try to get their photos. If you are a B2B business, then do show logos of your clients.
• Show press mentions – Did you appear on the news or some popular magazines/blogs/news sites?
• Show Industry Association seal – If you are member of your industry association, show off those seals.
• Site security seals – If you collect personal information or credit card payment on your site, then it is absolutely necessary to show your site security seals (Verisign, Truste, McAffee, etc).

Create Awesome and Epic Content

Once you’ve made a strong impression on your visitors with a professional looking site and have established your credibility, you still need great, jaw dropping content to keep your visitors engaged. How do you create great content?

Content is a combination of texts, graphics, and videos that work well together to deliver the message that resonates with the visitors. To create great content, you first need to have a clear understanding of who your target audience is, what their pain points are, what problems they are trying to solve, and how can you make their life easier or better with your solutions.

Content is the foundation of your website and marketing efforts. To drive traffic and repeat visitors, you must continuously add content to your site. A great way to add content to your site is to add a blog. You can write blog articles about anything that might provide value to your visitors. Topics that are interesting to your visitors include news and trends in your industry, how to do certain things better, faster, or cheaper. You can also do interviews with other experts in your industry and post the interview in your blog article.

Be sure to follow good copywriting principles when writing your content. Also, make sure you format your content for best user experience, which means using lots of bullets, avoiding long sentences and long paragraphs, and use bolded sub headlines to introduce different topics.

Do Everything Possible to Capture Your Visitors’ Email!

When visitors come to your website, if they don’t call you or fill out the contact form, you don’t want them to just leave and forget about you. That would be a waste of your marketing money and efforts.

You have to be able to capture your visitors’ email.  But in order for your visitors to give up their emails, you need to offer them something compelling. Perhaps, you can offer them a free report, a free Ebook, a coupon, free demo, etc. Make the offer as attractive as possible.

Once you have your prospects’ email, you can continue the dialogue and build a relationship with your prospects by providing them with additional offers and content (articles, case studies, videos, webinars, etc). This process is essential for building trust. It may take a few weeks to a few months before prospects decide to do business with you.

You can use an “autoresponder” email marketing service to send email messages to your list of prospects automatically. A good starter autoresponder service for small businesses that you can use is Aweber, probably the most popular one out there. It costs only $20 a month.

Since Aweber is an established email service company and is recognized among Google, Yahoo, AOL, your email messages will have higher delivery rate and not end up in the SPAM box.

Another good email marketing program to use is Vertical Response.

Website Design Resources

For small business websites, I highly recommend building your website on the WordPress Content Management System. There are lots of advantages to using WordPress. First of all, it’s a free content management system, which makes it really easy for you to update or make changes to your site. No programming or geeky stuffs required. Additionally, there are lots of plugins available that add lots of cool and useful features and functionalities to you site.

And with the help of a professional wordpress theme, you could produce an attractive and professional looking site within hours. Here are 2 WordPress themes professional designers use:

1. Thesis theme – If you enjoy customizing and producing your own unique designs, the Thesis wordpress theme would be perfect for you. Used by many professional designers and businesses, Thesis has awesome built in typography and powerful SEO features as well as design flexibility.
2. Studiopress theme – Studiopress theme is also another popular wordpress theme that has amazing designs and powerful SEO features. If you just want an attractive and professional looking website without having to do much customization, then the Studiopress would be perfect!

Where to get High Quality Images & Graphics

Here are 2 places to get high quality images and graphics:

• Fotolia
• Bigstockphoto

Email Autoresponder Service

• Aweber
• Vertical Response