AP 0891: How Much of My Web Traffic Should Be Return Visitors?

AskPat 891 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 891 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help answer your online business questions five days a week.

We have a great day coming in today from Joseph, but before we get to Joe's question I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is DesignCrowd. So if you're stuck on ideas on how to develop your logo, website, or any other image-related things, or design-related things on your website, check out DesignCrowd. It's a website that helps businesses crowdsource custom graphics from over 500,000 designers worldwide. So it doesn't matter what kind of business you have; you can get a perfect design every time or your money back. Check out DesignCrowd.com/askpat to learn more and download your free guide to crowdsourcing great logos, graphics, and websites for your business, and you can get $100 off your next design when you enter the promo code “AskPat.” Awesome. Now, here's today's question from Joseph.

Joseph Lalonde: Hey Pat, Joseph Lalonde here, of JMLalonde.com. I've been building my audience over the last couple of years and I'm pleased with the traffic levels. However, there's one problem I'm noticing: Getting returning visitors. Currently, I average 12-15 percent in return visits. What percentage of my traffic should be returning visitors, and what can I do to grow that number? Thanks for all you do Pat, and love the show.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Joseph, Thank you so much for your question. Now, what percentage of our website visitors should be returning? Ideally it would be 100 percent, right? We would want them all to return. Now, the numbers are going to be a little bit skewed. It can never be 100 if you're using Google Analytics if you're always continually getting new people coming in, because that number includes everybody, so of everybody who comes back into your website, 12-15 percent are those who have been on your website before. It kind of a little bit different than how many people come to your website come back, right? It's a little bit different, but we can still use it as a great point of, okay, well how many people are returning to our website?

So how do you increase that number, or what should it be? I think that those numbers are fairly low, and there are things that you can do, which I'll mention in just a moment, that you can do to increase them, but what is a good number? It's hard, because some sites, they don't need returning visitors, so for example on SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com, my website that helps security guards, that number is really low. But the reason is because people go there, they find what they need, and they move on. They don't come back. Whereas on Smart Pass, I think it's 25-plus percent, and that's because there's continual content, I'm engaging, email lists are helping bringing people back, all those kinds of things can help with getting people to come back to your website.

What I would recommend doing is really utilizing your email list. Like, I can give you a list of 100 different strategies that could do, Joseph, but what I would recommend doing is focusing on one or two and really nailing those things down. So hopefully, Joseph, you are focusing on building an email list and utilizing that email list to not only communicate with your audience, to not only ask questions so you can understand how to better serve them, but also to drive traffic to your website. A lot of times, people who are on your email list, they're not always on your site, but if there's something there that can help them, they're going to be more likely to come back, and that's going to help your traffic. The nice thing about utilizing your email list for traffic is that if you have ability to share on your website, well then you're going to get more traffic to posts, more shares as a result of that, which means more people coming to your website who are brand new, and more people coming on your email list who then, the next time they see a post that is interesting to them, they're going to share. So it just continues to grow and grow from that. That's why I think it's really important to utilize your email list for your posts. And it's up to you to determine how often you email. Do you email every single post or just kind of really important ones? It's up to you. So I'm not going to tell you how often you should do that, but you should absolutely be utilizing your email list to drive more traffic to your website, and all that traffic obviously are going to be returning visitors, or most of them, if they're coming from the same IP address when they come back. Keep that in mind.

Secondly, I think building a community is the other aspect of it. Keeping people around is going to be very important, and a community is often a very good strategy for keeping people around. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean you have to build a community on your website directly. But if you build a community where people can come back, where they associate with you and with each other and they're communicating with each other, they're feeling engaged, they're interacting, then they're going to be more likely to come back because you are facilitating these discussions under your brand. When you can do that, it often heightens your own brand as well, not only just the awareness of it, but people wanting to come back and read other things that people reference. Those are amazing ways to bring back returning visitors.

Those are the two things I would work on. Email lists and utilizing your email to drive more traffic to your website, and then also building a community, and that can be as simple as a Facebook group. Not a page, but a group. A group is a lot more conducive to communication and interaction between the groups. If you want to be a part of my group to see how a well-run one is done—and I don't say that because I'm running it, but because there's a number of admins there running it too, although I am very active in it now. If you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/community, you'll see a Facebook group there of 31,000 people plus who are there, who are helping each other out, and the admins, just big shout out to them, they're helping to keep spam at a minimum and all those kinds of things. Anyway, go ahead and check it out, SmartPassiveIncome.com/community, and that's really cool because those are people who know about me, yeah, but there're also people who can identify with each other as people who are interested in building online businesses and helping out with their brands, and of course, referencing SPI for that information.

There you go, Joseph. Hopefully that helps. I appreciate you asking this question. I want to wish you all the best of luck, and thank you again. I want to send you a teeshirt also, and you'll hear from my assistant in the next couple of weeks so we can collect your information for that.

For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show as well, all you have to do is head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thank you so much, I appreciate you, and here's a quote to finish off the day by Helen Keller, and that is, “When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us. ” Love that. Cheers, take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.