Just promoting a website isn't enough
In my last article, I explained that a website is never going to be successful without promotion. Not only that, simply posting a few tweets on Twitter wouldn't really accomplish anything - a strategy encompassing multiple media avenues was required. Surely, that will be enough?
Sorry, but no. You see, getting people to visit you website is only half the battle. Once they arrive, you need to convince them to stay and look around, and ideally to want to visit the site again at a later date. The secret to achieving this is content.
Now, you should already have high quality, interesting content in place on the site by the time it launches. However, in order to get your visitors to come back, you need to update your content on a regular basis. This includes both adding new content, and refreshing the existing content when appropriate.
To appreciate why this is required, think of a typical retail store. Every new product they receive will be given pride of place in the most consipicuous part of the store - so that customers will notice the new product and be drawn in. At the change of season many products will be replaced with newer versions, or even with something different entirely. Occasionally, the store will simply move everything around to provide the illusion that their product range has changed. Whatever the store does, they are trying to attract customers by showing them something new.
In this example, a product is analogous to a piece of content on your site - it needs to be replaced or refreshed so that your customers notice that something is different and hence actually pay attention to your content. The change of season is equivalent to a large scale refresh of content, although this would be on a smaller scale for a website. The final option of moving everything around is not really applicable to the web, as attempting it will cause more harm than good.
If you frequently add new, high quality content to your site, you will start to convert your visitors from one-off attendees to regulars. They will then start to share your content with the people that they know; they effectively start actively promoting your site for you. As I'm sure you will agree, this can only be a good thing.