But how do you manage it? And how do you ensure your traffic keeps coming back for it?
Blogging
One of the most popular new methods of constantly refreshing content is by maintaining a blog, short for weblog. This is almost an online personal or public journal you maintain as often as several times a day. On private or personal web sites, it may often take the form of a diary. On a business oriented website, a blog is generally updated daily or a couple of times a week, and contains information about your business or your product rather than personal feelings or thoughts.
One of the best things about blogging is that you can write all your content for a week and store it on the blog engine, setting entries to be released to the public blog daily or whenever you want them released. So you can maintain a daily blog even though you only work on it once a week.
Blogs, however, are time-intensive and may be too much for a busy business owner to maintain.
Articles
You can also maintain fresh articles on your site weekly or monthly. If you do update articles on a regular basis, make certain that the release date of the current article is prominently displayed somewhere on the article's page so that the surfer can see that the article is fresh. You should also maintain a dated archive of all the articles you've had on your site with their release dates at the top, so that casual browsers can also see you have a track record of maintaining fresh content.
But many web surfers go to your site, click away, and never return. How can you keep them coming back?
Newsletters
An emailed newsletter can be the most powerful tool you have to maintain repeat customers. It's a simple concept. You compose the newsletter in either plain text or in HTML. Allow your customer to sign up for free to receive your newsletter in their email every time it's released. Collect the email addresses, compile them into a database, and send out your newsletter on at least a monthly basis.
But it is a little more complicated. After all, you want to drive traffic to your site. Instead of putting entire articles in your newsletter, consider putting a teaser to certain articles in the newsletter, with a link to the article in its entirety on your website. Or insert a special coupon in your newsletter that the reader can redeem for special bargains or freebies on your website.
You can include a "what's new" section in your newsletter, highlighting any new products or developments on your website and directing the reader to appropriate links. And you can also allow other people to advertise in your newsletter, focusing on those with whom you have an affiliate relationship.
Another idea for your newsletter is to run a contest or survey. Everyone likes to win stuff, and everyone likes to be asked what they think. If you have a large email newsletter list, you can offer a gift certificate as a prize, but require anyone interested in participating to come to your website to sign up with their email. This gives you the added advantage of being able to compare the contest signups with your email list; are they significantly different? Or is it pretty clear who your best customers are?
Updating Content Frequently
Regardless of how you run your newsletter, you should never neglect your main site. Update its content frequently. Make sure all the information contained on it is correct and recent. Most importantly (though for a slightly different reason), make certain your home page has something fresh on it at least every month.
This isn't for your customers. It's for the web spiders. When spiders catalog your site, one of the things they've been looking for recently is differences from the last time they spidered your site and what's on your site now. If you don't have any differences this time, or the next time, or the next time, the spiders will decide you have a static website, and your ranking will go down. Frequent updates, or even just shuffling things around, on your home page will prevent this from happening.