Write Better Content & Treat Your Visitors to a Cookie
Posted on October 1st, 2009 in Online Marketing & Promotion, Website Management & Improvement, Writing Content.
Tags: cookie content, cookies, rewarding visitors, rewards, Writing Content
As a musician you naturally want to expose yourself to as many people as possible. Depending on your approach, your focus may be to obtain more fans, increase the amount of downloads from your site or it may be to attract potential enquiries or bookings or interest A&R folk.
It really comes down to the quality of your content. This can affect how long your visitors stick around on your site, where they navigate, how likely they are to make an enquiry or follow a download link, even subscribe to your newsletter.
To help with all of the above, try treating your readers like dogs. Let me explain.
When you train your dog to ‘sit’ and ‘lay’, what do you do? Any knowledgeable trainer will tell you that you reward the dog when it does what you want it to do. It then associates the command with the action and is happy to repeat its performance because it associates doing the job with getting a reward.
Soon enough, it’ll do as it’s told each time you give the command. And it isn’t too long before your dog wants to learn any other command you may have for it.
It’s positive reinforcement – it makes your dog a friend. It puts you in the same pack as your dog and it wants to do things for you. It’s happy and you’re happy.
Getting your readers to feel the same and act the same can be a powerful asset to your website and online community. One way of doing this is to offer them ‘cookies’, just as you would a dog with a dog treat.
Every time a visitor (a reader, listener, viewer etc.) does something you want them to do offer them a reward – a cookie.
Think about what you can offer and how you can offer it. What would your readers appreciate and what would make them come back and involve themselves more?
Obviously a standard 3-page with basic information probably isn’t going to be something you can do this with easily, but if you’ve created a more ‘living’ site that’s updated regularly and does what it can to please it’s readers and get them involved a little this approach is something you could really look into and implement easily.
I’ll be covering more shortly but in the meantime, if you have any ideas please do comment below.
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