Getting a loyal traffic base for your website is an important way in keeping your traffic high. People who like your website are also more likely to tell their friends about it in e-mails and post your website on other mediums like website forums and newsgroups.
There are many ways to help to develop loyal viewers, and I suggest that you try to implement one or more of them on your own websites.
Start a weekly or monthly newsletter, you can setup a mailing list on your website and distribute an e-mail on a regular basis that will tell your users about new things on your site, updates, or some new jokes!
Put up a “of the day” type section. Many websites have “babe of the day” or “joke of the day” and I find myself coming back to them almost everyday to check it out. It’s a great way to get people hooked on your website. But of course if you don’t update everyday then you might anger some of your readers.
Install a Forum on your website. If you get quite a bit of traffic already, try installing a forum on your website that will allow your users to write and post messages to each other in an open forum or private messages. If you have a niche site this is far easier to do that if you just have a general website.
Install some online games, quizzes, tests, and other interactive things. Users love to play, how many times have you found yourself at the computer spaced out, bored, looking for something to play with. I know I do from time to time. The first thing I do is type “I’m bored” or something silly like that in the search engine, and look for something time consuming to do. If you can develop a Macromedia flash game, or comic strip, or want to make a funny quiz, you’ll get a lot of users who play it, or tell people about it!
If you are an original content creator, syndicate your writing over RSS (Really simple syndication), so your users can use an RSS reader for viewing your site. This can also get you lots of extra traffic from RSS feed search sites!
There is so many different ways you can make your website more enjoyable for the user, be creative and try to do something that you would enjoy seeing on a website. Odds are if you like to do it, your users will too!