It isn’t difficult to promote your website and get visitors, but it’s a lot harder to persuade them to visit often. When your site is ’sticky’ visitors will want to return often. So, just how do you acheive it?

It all depends on your audience, what they were looking for in the first place, and what would really interest them enough to return. You need features they would want to use repeatedly. You need to know what they want.

If you really don’t know, ask them. What issues do they have or what problems do they want to solve? Build a webpage with a survey asking simple questions. Use askdatabase to analyse the results and then drive traffic to the survey page.

Here are a few ideas webmasters often use to get users to return to their sites again and again,

• Offer something free - everyone likes ‘freebies’. Perhaps a tip of the day, or if you provide photographs, a free photo each day
• Valuable information - a free white paper or short report to solve a problem, save money, save time or provide hard-to-get advice
• Adding news - you can add an RSS news feed, which gives visitors the latest news on your subject area. Look at rss feed reader
• Install a forum or bulletin board - this is not as difficult as it sounds and an active message board can attract regular visitors. Take a look at World Crossing
• Hold contests - many people are addicted to contests. Offer a prize that doesn’t just have value but also promotes your website

The ultimate in ’stickiness’ are social networking websites. They cleverly use the human need to socialise and make friends with others, so making the website a human magnet. Sites like facebook, flickr, and myspace are hugely successful at this.