What's In It for Me? by Carolyn Parks

What keeps people coming back to a website? From our experience, there is only one reason why people will come back again and again to a site and that is by reflecting upon what we ALL think whenever we do anything:

What's in it for ME?

There has to be a reason for people to spend the time to type in "www......com" in the navigation bar of their search engine. If a site is strictly promotional and fairly static in nature, people will visit when they have a specific need for your organization's product/service. If you are ok with visits being associated with a specific need that is urgent, then great.

But perhaps you are interested in more freqent visits (because let's face it, more frequent visits means a stronger relationship and better awareness of what your organization offers). What keeps people coming back more often? Well...what's in it for them?? Give them the frequent urge to pop back in. This could mean you offer exciting promotions, hot news, resources that are useful to them, etc.. If people feel they might be missing some kind of proverbial party, they'll keep checking in.

In our case, we at Outstanding Women Speakers believe that the best value we could possibly provide our visitors is INFORMATION...expert insights on the most topical organizational issues of today. Sure, we provide talented speakers which will ultimately help our clients. This is a given and people already know they can find this on our website. But it will be our goal to give them added value for visiting our site...if a potential client can take away an article or a set of tools that will help them within their own organization, then we feel we have contributed in a real way. If they decide to go with one of our speakers or not, their visit to our site has hopefully still been worthwhile. So, we will be committing ourselves to building a virtual treasure chest of the most credible expert insights in a variety of topics...we call it our Xpert Files - an exciting storehouse of leading edge knowledge.

So, to bastardize one of the most well known calls to action of all time: "think not what your clients can do for you, but what you can do for your clients!". We will be asking ourselves this question all the time and determining if we are actually thinking of our visitors as we develop our site.