Intro #9 - Increasing Site Usage and Visitor Retention

Are you already attracting some traffic to your site? One important statistic you can check is the new vs. return visits. You want to keep attracting new visitors, while at the same time have the people that already visited your site keep coming back. You can keep people coming back through regular content updates, but also if you are able to create site stickiness. If your site members feel that they have valuable information they need to access or use on your site, they’ll keep coming back. In this short blog post we discuss one specific functionality made possible through the MyLists Add-on that we developed specifically for this purpose.

Let me start off with an example. Say your site is about wines or beer and you have put together a huge catalog of wine and beer listings. Wine and beer aficionados will want to make lists of wines or beers they want to try and the ones the’ve already tried. The ones the liked, the ones they didn’t like. And so on … By giving people the ability to add listings to their own lists you are in effect creating site stickiness. Now they have this personal information that they took time to put together and they’ll want to coming back to check on their lists and update them. That, combined with review information that allows them to make informed decisions about what to add next is a valuable experience.

JReviews core comes by default with a favorites feature, which is a single list, that lets users quickly add listings. This works great for certain sites that don’t need more than a single list. For those sites where you want to provide more options, the MyLists Add-on allows you to build the killer app described in the above scenario!

The MyLists Add-on will work for products, businesses, classifieds, services, books, movies, tv shows, games and so much more. It will be useful in any situation where someone is inclined to create custom lists and keep coming back to them. And, in addition to site stickiness, it’s also a great way to surface relevant content on your site because when someone is viewing a listing for a specific wine or beer, they can see other public lists that also contain that wine or beer and check what other listings are included in that list. It makes it possible for people to find other people with similar tastes and bring up relevant content for them.

Read the next post #10 Building your Own Traffic and Reviews Hub