Seasoned small business owners have probably heard of sticky pages. Whether you think of sticky pages as the figurative meaning of being glued to your favorite movie or the literal meaning of sticky fingers, there is another meaning when talking about using sticky pages in online marketing. Put simply, when talking about websites, “sticky pages” are ones that contain features specifically designed to keep visitors “stuck” to your website a site longer!

For many businesses, the purpose of a website is to not only inform potential customers about their products or services, but to create and capitalize on sales opportunities. The average time people stay on a website is surprisingly just under 12 seconds. So keeping that in mind, when developing online marketing strategies it’s essential to incorporate creativity and engaging web tools to capture website visitors’ attention.

So, how can you keep website visitors interested, engaged and motivated to return? Apply creativity by focusing on sticky page elements! Online videos are proving to be very effective sticky page elements. Online videos give visitors a glance into the infrastructure of your business and put a face with your business. Business blogs can also be great sticky tools if you incorporate quality content that updates frequently. Other sticky elements can include surveys, polls, interactive commenting and contests. Basically, any marketing tool that engages your website visitors is an effective sticky element that you can strategically place within the content of your website.

It’s easier to tactically place sticky items by understanding how visitors view your website. Although we are taught to read pages left to right and top to bottom; however, as creatures of habit, we begin scanning a page in the upper right, move down the page and return to the upper left. Only at this point do viewers decide if the content is useful and worth reading further! The basic elements viewers read (in order) are the headline, sub heading, price or order link, and finally the body text.

When marketing your business online, keep in mind that visitors to your website should understand how your product or service benefits them within 11 seconds of scanning your site, or otherwise risk loosing valuable sales’ profits. Think about what key words or phrases best describe your business. Not only should you think what targeted keywords to add into your web content, but you should also incorporate key phrases into the description of your online video to help improve your video search optimization. Online videos offer business owners the ideal marketing tool in which to deliver an effective sales pitch as well as to present the message via an increasingly popular and affordable means of delivery!

Capturing the attention of potential customers using the internet is a difficult objective for many business owners to achieve, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s actually easier than you may think by using sticky elements such as videos to establish a loyal online customer base.