Getting visitors to your website is only one part of having a successful website. Another part of this challenge is actually keeping those visitors in your website. This is measured by a bounce rate. A bounce rate is how many of those visitors actually go further than one page (stay on your website). A higher bounce rate means that more people are just bouncing off your website and staying while a lower one means more are staying and actually reading what you have to offer.

Obviously a lower bounce rate is more preferable. If your website is “sticky” it means more people stay on the website and also come back to the website again and again (this reduces your bounce rate). What I want to talk about today is one way to make your website more “sticky” and that is creating resources.

Creating The Resources

The reason you would want to create these resources is to create something people will come back to. You want to create something of quality that people will tell their friends about.

The way I recommend figuring out what you’re going to create your resource about is think about your niche. Is there a problem or some information that is commonly referred to in your niche. By creating a resource about that exact topic, you create something that has a broad reach in your niche and people can legitimately use.

Lists, how tos and the like do well as a resource. So just write one and you’re done half the battle. Your resource is created and all you need to do is promote it to increase visibility and let people know it’s there.

Promoting The Resources

So now that your resource is created you need to let people know about it. The first thing I’d do is create a resources page for your website (if you have multiple resources to share). What this does is let people know of other great resources you’ve created and can really help cross promote your resources. The other thing it allows you to do is place a central link to your resources page on your website or blog to let people know they actually exist.

After you’ve set up where your resources will stay you will want to get to work promoting them. Use social media like StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx and the like to promote your resources and bring in new people who may find your resources helpful and pass them on.

You can also build links directly to your resources page to try and give them more exposure in the SERPs (search engine ranking placements). If you can get organic traffic to the resource pages you’ll be loving it. The organic people are already looking for that resource so will be thrilled when they find your resource page!

Wrap Up

To wrap up, I feel resources are a great way to make your website or blog more sticky. They aren’t that hard to create and promote and can really add some value to the website in question. If you can provide more value to your visitors they will keep coming back (and perhaps even bring their friends…) and isn’t that what we all want