The most important thing about your site is
getting website visitors and the second most important thing is to be
able to keep them there. Bellow are my top 5 ways to keep your visitors
on your website and to keep them coming back day after day.

Forums

The
great thing about forums is the users make the content, they ask and
answer questions, get millions of pages indexed by search engines and
come back every day for nothing!

Which Software?

Vbulletin
– vBulletin is a powerful, scalable and fully customizable forums
package for your web site. It has been written using the Web's
quickest-growing scripting language; PHP, and is complemented with a
highly efficient and ultra fast back-end database engine built using
MySQL.

Invision Power Services
– There community suite is perfect for any sized community you may wish
to run, from small fansites to a large corporate web presence. We
realize that not all communities are the same, which is why we have
worked hard to ensure that our suite can match your needs, not
vice-versa.

Phpbb
– Since its creation in 2000, phpBB has become the most widely used
Open Source forum solution. Like its predecessors, phpBB 3.0 “Olympus”
has an easy to use administration panel and a user friendly
installation process, which allows you to have a forum set up in
minutes.

From this table you can see that IPB is a more user friendly software and would rank top our of all forum software's.

Which Modification's do what?

Points
– You can allocate a point(s) for every time your user makes a post or
topic, points can be traded in for discounts or products. Cheap way to
build your forum, ive seen sites where you only get $4.00 of for 1000
points (1000 posts)! If a user has 500 points and need 1000 points to
get the product they want, they wont just stop visiting and posting on
your forum.

You can use this modification as a currency, buy and sell for credits.

Gallery –
Allow your users to add the images and work to your site, also allows
other members to post feedback and opinions on it, there for giving a
user a reason to come back and check on how the submission is going.

Profiles – Your users get there own personal space on your forum, with options of blogs, friends and comments.

Reputation – Users can post feedback on a user after transactions or help.

Store – A Modification used with points, you can add products and coupons to the store for users to trade in points for.

Here you can see the Invision Power Service's version of the Store Modification.

User's online today
– New comers hate to see you have no users online, this modification
shows user's and guests how many people have been online your forum in
the last 24 hours.

Where to Modifications:

Vbulletin – http://www.vbulletin.org/

Invision Power Services Modifications – http://www.invisionize.com/

Phpbb – http://www.phpbb.com

2. Blogging

Blogs
are known as web logs, a website where entries are written such as a
diary, but online. The idea is that the owner of the blog will write
entries and his visitors will comment with feedback and advice. Blogs
are coming ever more powerful over the last couple years with 100,000's
starting every week.

Blog Comments

What makes blogging so populer is the power to leave comments on blog
posts. This allows the user to get involved and leave there own
oppinion. This can be highly effective for some websites as you see
bellow in the screen shot "328 Responsese to this post".

Readers by Feedburner

FeedBurner makes it easy to receive content updates in My Yahoo!,
Newsgator, Bloglines, and other news readers. Everytime your blog is
updated, automaticaly your feedburner list will recieve a email to
check out your latest updated. A must have for all blogs.

To find out more about Feedburner click here…

3. User's Choice

Website Poll's

Website
poll's let uses have a choice and voice there own oppinions of what
they want. A great way to have users come back every week to see what
won the poll and to vote for the new poll.

Social Bookmarking

The
owners of digg.com brought a whole new meaning to user choice, they
allow users to decide weither they like the content or not, if they
done then it gets buryed. Bellow in the screen shot your see the
choices, to to digg the article (move up the article on the site),
comment the article, to bury to the article and to email the article to
a friend.

Ask Questions

Users
like to get involved in your site, let users ask questions. I've used
this technique on a website on Retire at 21. The users ask the
questions and i respond with the answers, now this is great because its
putting content on your website your visitors want to read. In future
if visitors need help or advice they will return to ask more questions.

4. Profiles

Have
a profile system on your website is great, with so many options sure
gives your users alot of reasons to come back to your site. Myspace
excercutes this perfectly, they allow users to send messages, post
comments, send mass messages, upload profile pictures, have there own
webpage and so much more. Dont take my word for it, take the
200,411,322 members on Myspace for it and in 2 seconds time another
10,000 peoples word for it.

Grab the script here for under 30 bucks!