You’ve just spent months working on your site content and design and everything was going great.  Your site traffic has been steadily increasing at a great rate and then all of the sudden you start noticing that the increase rate is not as high and not as steady.  Obviously, people are not getting “hooked” the way you expected them to and not appreciating the value of your website.  So what to do in this situation??? Well the first step is to make sure that you follow the five basic steps of making sure your site is as appealing as possible, and they are: 

• Provide relevant, high-quality content – This is probably the most important step, making sure your writing is not only of high quality but extremely beneficial to the reader. Also it needs to be relevant to what the readers subscribed for. You can improve relevance of your content by following these steps:
  - Make relevant, high-quality content your number one priority. Everything else is secondary, including look and feel, ease of use, uniqueness to the medium, and promotion.
  - Use market research to determine your target market and how valuable that market finds your site’s primary content.
  - Tell potential audience members how your site is relevant to them.
  - Identify related topics or tasks that are important to your target market.

• Make it easy to use – don’t make the assumption that everyone is as internet-savvy as you are. The more user-friendly your site is the more likely you will attract a much greater number of people.
  - Prioritize your content.
  - Boldly promote your most exciting content with size, color, animation, and/or screen position. Minimize less important content.
  - Organize your home page/site by creating clearly distinguishable areas. Group information into visual groups. You can base it on topic or functional similarity from the audience’s perspective (such as the navigation bar and the ad area).
  - Promote topics, articles, guests, or features specifically and dynamically (for example, “This week….”); as opposed to generically promoting a section of content (for example, “See our new services under the services section”).
  - Use meaningful and consistent button names to label sections and content areas. Use distinguishing adjectives to label special versions of common Internet activities (for example, Blogs or News Chat).

• Promote effectively, both on the site and in other media –
  - Advertise your site in related media (for example: advertise cooking lessons in cooking magazines, food websites, etc.)
  - Identify your site’s target audiences and emphasize the relevance of your site to each target audience.
  - Convey your site’s basic attitude and primary activities
  - Use fresh promos for each update of your site that advertise events, or storylines and plots to generate tangible interest in your site.
  - Let people know what is coming soon on your site.
  - Emphasize that sites are frequent and timely by referring to important dates and date-stamping the promo with phrases like “in this week’s blog…”
  - Consider using one distinct area of the page to promote new or timely content. This area should be distinguishable at a glance. Preferably this area will stay in the same prominent place but the look will change over time. Train people to look for new information in this location.
  - Encourage people to interact with your online ads by using audio encouragement, click here links, and rollover effects.

• Make the experience unique to the medium – create a community, get to know your readers and respond to their questions and comments regularly and on a timely basis.
  - ”Seed” conversations by introducing topics.
  - Have moderated conversations.
  - Organize different conversations into clearly labeled, mutually exclusive topics.
  - Have people fill out profiles and make these profiles easily discoverable.
  - Encourage people to send in pictures.
  - Make sure that people can tell each other apart. 

• Evoke emotion – challenge your readers by evoking different emotions. Don’t be afraid to write about a controversial topic or to challenge your readers by asking open ended questions. Evoking emotion should be consistent throughout the blog/literary work starting with the title and continuing throughout your document.