October 22nd, 2009 | by Jack Reichert
The Nature of Sticky
Your site is a product. Your site may be a free product, meaning, you are not charging access to the content on your site, but it IS a product, nonetheless.
Sticky is when visitors keep coming back. They’re stuck on you. On your site. They want more and more. This is a site owner’s dream. Advertising requests come without asking for them. The money starts coming in. You can retire young to Cancun and support yourself on only an hour of work… weekly.
So if you want people to like your site and keep coming back, then it would be a good idea to think of your site in terms of providing a product, or service, to your visitors – customers.
How to Create a Product that Will Get You Rich
There are two basic philosophies when creating a winning product:
One is the expensive product that people only need to buy once every 3-10 years.
The other is the inexpensive product, that people need more and more of.
A good example of the first product is a car. You don’t expect someone to buy more than one car in 3-5 years, at the very least. There are people that get a new car every year. But most people wait 5-15 years before getting a new one.
If you make cars you want to make a good product. You want people to buy your car. You want them to be so satisfied that they tell all their friends how great your car is. And you want them to buy their next car from you as well.
But you charge enough for your product so that you do not need them to buy a new car next week, regardless of the actual price of development.
An example of the second type of product is milk. Most people buy 2-3 containers of milk per week. Families often need a new container every day. Good thing they’re so affordable! Milk is a staple. You can’t really live without it. And most governments subsidize milk for that reason.
If you sell milk, to support yourself you need to make sure that people keep buying, every day. If your milk is bad, you’re out of business.
Is Your Site a Car or Milk?
You’re asking yourself: “What do milk and cars have to do with my site?”
While there are many kinds of sites, you can divide most sites into essentially one or the other of these types of products.
The Car: This is the site that has a feature, service or content that you need to keep using. It doesn’t change much. You don’t need much from it, just what it does well. You don’t need new features, but they are helpful when choosing against competitors. Like a car, you don’t need a new one all the time. But as long as it does its job, you’re there.
Sites like this can vary. One example is Google. You keep coming back because you need to find things. Another example could be an online game site. New games are nice, but you’re probably going to be coming back for your favorite game of spider solitaire.
The Milk: The classic example of a milk site is a blog or news site. People find you because they are looking for something. They’ll only come back if there is a promise from your site (usually only implied) to keep providing what they’re looking for. If the New York Times stopped publishing things of interest, we would stop being interested.
What Does this Mean for Me?
When thinking about the future of your site ask yourself the classic question: “Why should people come to my site?”
But just as crucial is the next question that you need to ask: “Why should they come back?”
If you are providing a service, that may be enough. If you are providing information, then be sure that what you offer is enticing enough to bring them back.
Leave a Reply
