Have a section that offers cool tips that relate to your business, your products or services, or your target market, as in Figure 3.4. These tips can be from one sentence to one paragraph long. In the example shown in Figure 3.4, Cosy Homes provides a “Quick Tip of the Week.” This tip is about watering your garden, but they change to a different subject every week. You can be guaranteed that homeowners will return to this site on a regular basis to read the quick tip of the week.
If visitors find your advice helpful, they will return repeatedly to see what interesting piece of information you have displayed that day. Ask your visitors
if they would be interested in receiving the tip via email or if they would like to be notified when the tip has been updated so they can then visit your Web site. Encourage people to send the tip to a friend. You can also encourage others to use your tip on their Web site as long as they provide a link back to your site as the source. You can go a step further and syndicate your content, putting it up on appropriate sites to be accessed and made available by anyone looking for content for their newsletter, e-zines, or Web sites. You can also make it available to other sites by way of an RSS (really simple syndication) feed.
All of these techniques work equally well for a featured section on your site. What is featured will be different for different Web sites.
This technique has been used very effectively by a number of businesses—featured treatments by spas, featured destination of the week by travel agencies, gardening tip of the week by gardening sites, ski tip of the week by ski hills,
golf tip of the week by golf courses, or fishing tip of the week for fishing camps. There are as many options for tips and featured sections as there are businesses.