I thought that I would share a little bit of how I design my sites, to get bookmarks. A solid base of bookmarks are crucial for both your revenue and traffic. Here is why and how, you could design your site(s) to get bookmarks.

If you take a look on the big players on the net, you will find that a big majority of their base traffic is built up by people that has added their site to their bookmarks. A surfer that has added a bookmark to your site, is a person that trust you, your site and the content you provide. A surfer that has bookmarked your site, is much more likely to buy or sign up for something that you offer, on your site, since he or she trusts you.

In addition to that, bookmarkers are also willing to share their finds with their friends, co-workers etc. When I look for the referring sites report on my server stats, I always see  some of visits that has originated  from e-mail programs and e-mail services. That way I know that somebody out there, trusted or liked my sites that much, so he or she wanted to share it. Of course, that also goes for backlinks, a site that provides something interesting or useful, will also be generating backlinks on it’s own.

The most important thing that you must do, in order to get bookmarks, is to add fresh and unique content to your site frequently. What is frequent? Well, instead of updating your sites everyday, you could be smart, and analyze your sites statistics. Find out how often and when the majority of your surfers, visits your site.

Lets take an example, if you find out that most visits occur on Monday and Thursday, around 3pm, then you most make sure that you always have new content for your surfers, on those days. A ground rule is, give your surfers what they want and they will return over and over again.

When I build a new content site, I never add advertisement, from the start. I keep it clean and simple. That way, the content will be in focus. When the surfers visits, for the first time, it’s not the ads they want, it’s the content, and if they find the site to be useful, they might add it to their bookmarks. Later on, when the traffic starts to grow, I begin adding the ads. By doing so, my ads get much more attention from the visitors. If a page suddenly have an add on it, that wasn’t there before, you can be sure that the surfer will notice it! Which will also have a positive effect on your click through ratio. Try it, on the next site you design, and you will see a difference.

Another way of generating bookmarks is to give your visitors a way to interact with each other, or with you. That can be a chat room, a forum on your site’s topic, a shout box or something as simple as a letting them comment your articles. The idea is to form a community sense among your surfers and give them the feeling that they provide with something to the site. If you succeeds with that, your visitors will come back day after day, to discuss and interact, about your site’s topic.

Take advantage of the fact that humans are curious beings. Add a blog or a journal to your site and write posts about yourself, or how the work with your site is done. That way you will show that there is a real person, behind the site, and people like to know that.
Let the surfer think that he or she gets a sneak preview of something. Use cliffhangers in your posts. That way you give your surfer a reason to come back to your site, and most likely the surfer will bookmark your site.

Let the surfer be involved in your site. If they feel committed to your site, they will visit it over and over again, plus they will create a buzz around it. You can do that by posting surveys or create polls. They can be about if you should add a new feature or not or something that is related to the topic of your site. Try to create polls and surveys that stands out a bit, and are interesting for your visitors.

For last, add something that will be addicted to your visitors, like a small game or quizzes. Create weekly competitions, where the price could be something trivial as a T-shirt or a coffeecup, with your URL on it. People loves to compete and they will come back, to see if they had won or to check out the scoreboard. In addition to that, you can have your surfers to register, before they can play. That way you could have a nice base for your site’s newsletter.