What good is your website traffic if your visitors are leaving at the home page? You don't want visitors ON your site, you want 'em IN your site. Use these five painless ideas for getting visitors INTO your site.

   1. Establish your site's main goal.

Your website can have several different goals, so long as you don't try to achieve each of them at once. For instance, say you want your site to attract more subscribers to your ezine, secure new customers for your products, and attract repeat visitors.

Pick ONE of those goals to focus on the hardest, and make the other two secondary goals. If you're relatively new at designing effective websites, start out by focusing on one goal ONLY, and forget the others until the next go round.

   2. Use home page lead-ins to content-laden pages.

If your primary goal is, let's say, to secure customers for a new your product, you can lead visitors into that product in several ways. Here's an example:

Write an article on the general subject matter of your product, including an eye-catching title -- read: HEADLINE -- for the article. Then, create a page for it on your website. On your home page, post the first few sentences of that article with a link to read the rest of it on its own page.

Better yet, you could leave your article excerpt hanging in mid sentence to entice your readers to click deeper into your site to read the article. (Just be sure the article page loads fast.) Here's an example of an effective article excerpt lead-in:

---
     In only one day, I had over 400 new visitors clamoring
     their way into my website. I didn't use search engines,
     ezine advertising, or spam, and it didn't cost me
     anything -- not one thin dime. So how did I do it? What
     was the FREE...

     Click here now to read the rest of this article!
     < http://ExpertOnEbiz.com/articles/yahoosecrets.html >
---

If you've targeted your lead-in to attract your average visitor, who WOULDN'T want to go read that article?

   3. Change your home page content and/or layout often.

Nearly every time I redesign or add new content to my site, I see an increase in activity. (Whether that increase is in sales, page views, etc. depends on exactly what I've done to the site.) You don't want to change the look of your site TOO much, or you'll have your visitors heads reeling. Maybe once every few months is sufficient, but test to see what works best for your particular audience.

If you're updating the content, on the other hand, you never can do THAT too much. Your only limitation is how often you have time to add new content to your site. For instance, I normally add new content on my newest site every two weeks. Each time I release an article for reprint, I announce it in the "What's New" list on my home page, and post the article itself in the article directory.

   4. Be creative.

When thinking of new ways to lure visitors into your site, the possibilities are endless. For example, look at e-Business Moms < http://www.e-BusinessMoms.com >. Bina, the Webmaster, describes her home page lead-ins as if they're areas of her site, but the links ACTUALLY lead to articles.

When visitors click on that initial link, they want to learn more about the topic the article covers. They end up reading (or at least skimming) the article, subconsciously starting to establish Bina as an expert in her field, and perhaps then seeking out MORE of her articles to read. Jackpot!

   5. Eliminate clutter and distractions on the home page.

I don't know how many times a day I go to a site that sounds interesting, but ends up being a hideous conglomeration of disorganized links, cramped advertisements, and loud colors that my eyes STILL see after I'm long gone from the page.

Ouch! What a way to send your visitors hightailing it.

Giving your visitors too many options means that they're leaving on the first page. Loud colors that make your visitors' heads bleed mean that they're leaving BEFORE the page finishes loading.

Look again at < http://www.e-BusinessMoms.com >.

The site is a nice soothing white and blue, with brighter colors used sparingly. There's absolutely no clutter, and the text and graphics are engaging -- not frightening. All in all, Bina sets a wonderful example of a site that presents an inviting atmosphere for increased visitor retention.

Do you?

Better go make sure. ;-)

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Harmony Major is the creator of Ready, Set, PROFIT!, helping you multiply your profit each and EVERY month, promote your site in ONE-FIFTH the normal time, and gain more free time INSTANTLY ... 100% guaranteed. Go to: http://hypertracker.com/go/emag/porch320/

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