5 Things to Do to Make Your Site Interactive
Posted by Mike | Filed under Traffic-buildingLet’s face it. Interactive sites get more visitors than sites which have nothing but words. Compare the two pictures below. Imagine that the roads are websites, and the cars are visitors.
Which would you like your site to be? Of course, you would prefer to have a lot of cars on your road.
So… how can I make my site more interactive (and get more visitors)? There are some things that you can do/implement to make your visitors want to come back again. Some of these things will even ‘force’ them to pass your site’s URL to their friends!
Here are five (5) things that you can do to make your site interactive:
Put a shoutbox. A shoutbox can be really useful especially if you want your visitors to stay on your website. People will use it to chat with their friends and other people who visit your site (who share the same interests with them)! Just make sure that your shoutbox has a spam protection.
Put related games. If you can, put some games related to your site’s topic. This is a good way to share information to your visitors. For example, your site is about cellphones. A game which flashes an image of a certain mobile phone and asks the player to determine what model of phone is that is would be great.
Allow your users to customize. Let them change the look and feel of your site! By simply putting a little color palette or a template chooser on your pages, your visitors will enjoy browsing your site. Let them feel comfortable by allowing them to change the way how your site appears to them. They will stay longer and have fun while using your site because they are getting the information that they want while they feel at home.
Set up a point system. This will encourage your visitors join your site’s community and share their knowledge. That means more readers and content for you! Here’s an example of a good point system:
For every contribution made by a user, he gets some points. These points may be used to:
- enter raffle contests
- gain more privileges
- get links from your site to his site
It’s also a good idea to reward points to people who refer new users to your site. 
Run polls and surveys. Ask some simple questions to your visitors like “Which is your favorite HTML editor?” or something like that. That way, your visitors will feel that they’re important and they will come back for the next survey/poll because they will think that their answers are important to you. Be sure that your visitors will find the questions interesting!
Well, that’s it for now. The things above will surely make your site a fun place to be in. People will recommend your site to their friends especially if they see it as a HELPFUL, FUN and ENJOYABLE place on the web.
Great post.
In trying to keep visitors on your site or coming back with these interactive features, it is important to strike a balance. These interactive features can very easily distract your visitors from the main purpose of your site.
“These interactive features can very easily distract your visitors from the main purpose of your site.”
Yes, that’s true. Some sites which automatically play MP3s and/or have very glittery pages are just too ‘interactive’.