For most internet marketers, their website is the life blood of their business. It’s where they can display their wares to best effect and to encourage keen and curious visitors to browse their many products and services. The hope is that these precious visitors will be impressed enough by the skill of the advertising copy that they will put their hands in their pockets and reach for their credit cards. But there are some website owners that seem to go to great lengths to do exactly the opposite and use every trick in the book to drive those visitors away. Let’s look at how they cleverly achieve that.

One of the best ways to annoy a new visitor to your site into leaving straight away is to bombard them with an in-your-face popup. Luckily, most browsers have popup blockers, but there are some really determined webmasters out there that manage to write code to get round that, so they still have a chance to get their hard earned visitor to reach for the mouse and click on the X. They seem determined to force that fickle visitor to fill in their opt-in box by ramming into their faces. Having one on the homepage just doesn’t seem enough to the really xenophobic website owner, the ones that cry, “Get away. Get away!” Well, guess what. That ploy definitely succeeds.

Not far behind the annoying popup in the race to get everyone to desert your website lurks the dreaded flash presentation. Especially the ones that take forever to load up, even on a fast internet connection. Even better are the ones that don’t let you exit from the presentation before it’s finished. You can rest easy in your bed with one of those, because no one is going to hang around for long enough to see what your website is actually selling.

Well, lets assume that the really determined visitor, still clutching his or her credit card so tightly that their knuckles are turning white, has managed to close your popup window and stay riveted to your half hour flash film of a boat sailing along some exotic river and has actually got to your homepage. Well, they’ve found it alright, but they can’t find anything on it because it’s so cluttered with ad banners for a hundred different products and services, none of which is what they came to your site to see in the first place. It takes a real tough cookie to stick around much longer.

But the final nail in the coffin must come when after all that poor visitor has been through, they are then subjected to some old, decrepit company director type yapping away about some great opportunity that must not be missed. The best ones talk incessantly in a nasally, annoying, heavily accented voice with so much echo it sound like they recorded it in a bathroom. Just as you’re searching frantically for the button to shut him off, the twenty year old synthesizer music starts playing at full volume and the neighbours start banging on the walls because you’re still surfing at three in the morning (that was a really long flash presentation).

Well, the moral of this story is if you want to have the fewest visitors to your site possible, then the above measures will pretty well achieve that. Best of all, those few visitors that do stick around then leave will never come back to despoil your beautifully crafted and highly expensive website. On the other hand, if you want the opposite to happen and want people to actually stay and buy stuff from your site, then you have to keep it simple and effective.