In the last few years the way we use the internet has changed and people expect to be able to have their say and play a part in the day to day progress of a site. No longer are they content to passively read the words you provide, like birds feeding at a bird table, and it's these aspirations that you need to harness to drive your site forward.
Specifically, it's the ability to receive and process your visitors suggestions and their annotations to both existing comments and new material that can make your site act like a magnet and attract visitors back time and again.
If the modern internet is about anything it's about interactivity and interactivity can be made to generate traffic if you add it to an existing website or blog.
Comments
The first thing to ensure is that people can leave comments at the end of posts or articles. This provides the visitor with the opportunity to say what they think of the content and make their own views known. Above all else, this is what readers now expect for it gives them a degree of interaction totally missing from traditional websites or from print publications.
There is then a natural tendency for the visitor to come back and see if there has been a reply or to look for other posts or articles on which to comment. Commenting like this is still fairly new and so still has a certain novelty value.
But it's not all one way. Comments enable an astute author to shape and plan material and so produce better or more relevant content that, in turn, inspires more comment. It can produce a never-ending feedback loop to the benefit of all concerned.
Polls
People like filling in polls to air their views and then checking if others agree (or otherwise). Although polls don't encourage repeat visits, they do make visitors stay and may cause them to look around the site for further interaction.
In order to work at their best, polls need to be constructed carefully to ensure that they are both fun to do and that they ask and give meaningful content. Again, the answers given to carefully and thoughtfully worded polls can provide useful information for the webmaster.
Forum
A forum will provide the visitor with many ways to interact with others who visit the site and to bring forth their thoughts and ask questions. However, if you think about it, forums do more than this. They provide an engaging environment where visitors can return time and again to carry on conversations and check answers to questions.
Often forums are implemented as pre-made scripts and so look different from the main site and this can give them a feeling of being there just for the sole purpose of interaction.
The fact they they are not can be used by the site to publicise new and upcoming ideas and products and keep visitors happy and on the site for as long as possible. So long as the visitors are discussing matters which are relevant to the site and there is a way to navigate straight back to the site, then the forum is serving a useful purpose.
When people look back at the way the internet changed at the beginning of the 21st century, high on their list may well be the beginning of interactivity between webpage and visitor and the start of the way that information, discussion and comment expanded to the mutual benefit of all. If you have a website or blog then adding these features is easy and it may well, after a few weeks, increase your traffic and the 'stickiness' of your site.
