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Five Ways to Keep Customers Interested in Your Web Site Over the Summer
From offering summer specials to starting a blog, these tips will make your site inviting to visitors.

June 2007

Ahhh, don't we all love summer? The nice weather, the barbecues, the fiestas, the vacations… Sadly, summer is the mean season if you're a business owner who relies on your web presence to bring in clientele for your products or services. Some web sites report as much as a 50% drop in their traffic during the summer months.

So how can you combat this? Now's the time to take a look at your site design and online marketing strategies to make sure you're doing everything you can to drive traffic to your site. Here are five things you can do to keep customers interested in your site this summer.

1. Offer special summer promotions
Have a sale or discount that centers around a summer theme, such as Memorial Day, the Fourth of July — or activities people typically do on those occasions. Include the information on your site, and in email newsletters, if you send them.

2. Start an email marketing campaign
This is another powerful medium you can use to keep in touch with your customers and inform them of anything new and exciting that you may have to offer. And Campaigner by GOT is a Yahoo! Small Business partner, so if you sign up from your Web Hosting Control Panel, you'll receive a discount on your account.

Campaigner guides you through the process of launching a campaign. You start by adding a link to your web site that customers can click to access a sign-up form. The system collects customers' email addresses, and enables you to send email to them.

When you send e-mail about your summer specials, make sure the headings are attention-grabbing, and the content is relevant, concise and informative. Don't email your customers too often — one relevant message is vastly more valuable than five not-so relevant ones. Especially during the summer months, you're much more likely to capture their attention with fewer, more targeted, communications.

3. Add summer blog entries to your site
Your Yahoo! Small Business account offers three blogging tools: Yahoo! 360 (for beginners), WordPress, and Movable Type (for intermediate to advanced bloggers). Blogging gives you the ability to write fresh and relevant articles about your products and services. This will entice your users to return to your web site to check out what's new for the season, as well as offer them a medium to exchange their ideas and suggestions.

Search engines love fresh and unique content, so your blog posts will also help you show up in organic results. If you don't have time to write or you're not comfortable writing, you can hire reasonably priced experts at freelance sites such as Elance.

You can even leverage your blog posts by submitting them to sites and forums that are relevant to your industry. Take advantage of community-based sites such as Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Squdoo, and Technorati. If your article is interesting and offers value, you have a good chance of generating lots of free traffic.

4. Add user reviews to your site
User-generated reviews will help establish the trustworthiness and credibility of your website, products and services. In fact, a recent survey by Marketing Sherpa shows that 58% of people "strongly" or "somewhat" prefer sites that include reviews.

The easiest way to add reviews to your Yahoo! site is by collecting feedback from customers and adding it to your site. If you'd like users to post their own reviews, you can ask for feedback in a blog entry.

5. Start a search marketing campaign, or alter your keywords for the season
I personally love pay-per-click advertising. Why? Because there is no better marketing medium available that allows the end advertiser to capture the targeted audience exactly when it's interested in the particular product or service that you have to offer.

If you haven't tried a search marketing campaign, sign up for one of the big three (Yahoo!, Google, or MSN) and try a few keywords. If you offer your services only in a limited geographical area, Yahoo! Search Marketing enables you to target web users in just that area, and you can start with a budget as small as you like.

If you're already advertising with search engines, take a look at your keywords to make sure they reflect any seasonal promotions, offers, and related content you might have on your site.

Farukh Shroff spearheads the Internet Marketing Division for Solid Cactus, a Yahoo! Store Developer and Yahoo! Small Business partner. In his role as the General Manager of Internet Marketing, Farukh oversees development of the Affiliate Marketing Management, Search Engine Marketing Management, Search Engine Optimization, and Media Marketing Management services.