How to get web traffic to keep coming back

I've been playing with a system that potentially will bring traffic back to my sites over and over again without me having to pay anything for the privilege.

Note that this is not random traffic like the sort you get with FreeViral (which is doing quite nicely for me now) but is 100% targeted traffic.

Actually, now that I've written that sentence I've just realised that there's a lot more to this than I thought. Repeat, targeted, free and keen traffic must be about the best going.

What the system I'm playing with does is let your visitors fill in a form so that they get an automatic alert sent to them whenever the content of your web page changes. When you make a change, they get notified by email and if they like your site, they'll come back.

It's easy to implement too - but I'll do some more tests before reporting back here.

What else have I done this morning?

I've sent an email to around 1,000 subscribers. If they like it, I'll roll it out to the rest of my AdSense Insider list. I never like to send out an email to everyone without doing some statistical analysis to check that what I'm sending out is useful, informative and welcome.

Perhaps I should state that I do this sort of testing on my signup page