7 Tips to Keep People on Your Blog Longer
While many people have set a goal of multiple goals, there is one universal goal that everyone should be trying to attain. No matter what type of blogger you are – writing for a personal blog, for a company, or for profit in general, you want to be able to attract new visitors to your blog and retain them for as long as possible without forcing them to stay on your blog. In other words, your blog should be able to meet the readers’ expectations without having to spend too much time promoting your site, spending time and money elsewhere on advertising.
The Benefits of Keeping Someone on Your Blog Longer
- Your visitors will end up visiting more of your internal pages and discovering what you have to offer versus if they had quickly left the site.
- Your sales will likely increase, as your readers will become more connected with your site. This means more cash in your pocket.
- More readers will recommend your blog and content, leading even more people to spend more time on your blog down the road.
How to Keep People on Your Blog Longer
While it may be impossible to keep people on your site if you don’t have any content, the following are some tips on how to get the most out of your readers’ stay.
#1. Be sure that your site is complete
This includes your theme, sidebars, etc. If you don’t have this, people will assume that your blog is still “in construction” and leave quickly thereafter.
#2. Add something your readers can “take away” from your site
Something such as newsletters, downloads, or tips – in general, a product that ensures they will be branded with a good impression of your site, returning to see if you’ve updated or added new products.
#3. Allow readers to share your content
The popular AddThis and universal Add To Any wordpress plugin do wonders in allowing readers to share your content, leading more people to visit individual posts.
#4. Link to related posts
A very effective technique to encourage your readers to visit more pages on your blog is to link to other related posts within or at the end of your posts. There are a couple ways you can do this and the best way is to use a wordpress plugin such as Simple Tags.
#5. Create longer, more structured posts
Even if you write a long, say one thousand word post, it won’t get the same level of traffic as a shorter, three hundred word post that has been structured and isn’t a single paragraph.
#6. Ensure that your blog’s load speed is optimized and fast-loading
There are several methods of addressing this, such as reducing the size of images, your theme’s code, and so on, but with the rise of broadband, it shouldn’t be a major issue unless dozens of widgets have been placed within your sidebars.
#7. Make sure everything “works”
If there are broken links and images that don’t display, it’ll become obvious that you aren’t taking blogging seriously – leading them to leave at a quicker pace.
Conclusion
The truth is, you need traffic to sustain a well-developed backbone of central content. Once visitors discover this, they will continue to visit your site, awaiting each post or new product. At this point, you have nearly limitless options as to how large your blog will grow.
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I agree with you and the best point i think is giving readers something worth so that they can have a long term memory of your site.
I think themelib is popular in the sense that it gives a lot of information and more importantly provides some templates for free, which makes a good impression to visitors.
People like us always visit this blog thinking, we have at least something new today and posts like this always makes us to click on “continue reading” from the home page.
Also, i think #4 is great in terms of keeping visitors for a long time on your site.
Mainly because link to related posts help users to explore similar posts of their interest.
This also aids to increase traffic of your blog.
Blogger user can use such related posts widget or related posts by category widget which shall certainly help to keep users for a long time on their blog.
Rss feeds subscriptions are very usefull for a blog, they do get your visitors back.
Long articles ar also a factor, but it depends if the article is very well structurated and write, if you just post copy-paste articles mixing them together, i dont think visitors will have more than 10 secs on it.
Ussualy plugins work well also, interative ones.
Agreement with you. RSS feeds subscription is very useful for me. Many readers using it.
Very good post…
I agree with some of the commentators here. Email subscription is very much important to keep people intact to your blog.
Even I am your email subscriber and visit your website as soon as you post new contents..
Thanks fr sharing the above contents..These are very helpful for us.
Regards,
Yogindernath
Apart from above mentioned things, I would to add that website/blog layout is very much important. People will seldom like to visit a blog again with a bad layout. Like themelib.com has an execellent layout and I enjoy visiting this website because the layout is exceptional and the contents are also great.. Cheerzz
What Pallgupta1 said right.. A good layout also attracts visitors. Even i give much importance to my blog layout..
Thanks for the tips, I was told the other day to use more pictures in my posts as it seems like the content is ok, but pictures speak 100 words.
I will try and put your tips into practice.
RSS feeds subscription is very useful feature.. Even im an RSS reader for this website.
RSS feed reader and blog speed optimization is very important. Speed should be fast and it should be flooded by unnecessary gadgets which may annoy the visitors.
yup, agree. great tips, i like simple eyecatching design and usefull content also important.
How about having some pictures and animation on posts? But be careful not to overdo it because it will overpower the content.
I agree with your tips, but content should also be one major consideration as “content is king.” Thanks for the useful information.
Thanks for sharing this. I make sure readers take something from my blog when they drop by.
another thing the op should consider writing here is ads placement. Dont harass visitors with your ads, or they wont come back. I am reffering to those kind of blogs that have all the adsense units on a single post, where the actual post barely can be seen.
Great tips! I would add to this, and I’m not sure if you’d call it black/gray hat, but using a target=”_blank” on the a tags will open the destination in a new browser, leaving the page they were looking at in the original window.
This *could* help to increase page visit time, no? At least, that has been my assumption so far. I haven’t really tested it and quantified it. Makes sense though.
Well, I used to do just like you. After reading the post on Smashing Magazine http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/01/should-links-open-in-new-windows/ , I don’t do it anymore. You should read it too
Nice post !
Content is King! Good content is going to get links and backlinks. Ads can be annoying but for good content I’ll scroll through it.
Great tips my friend! You always have very informative posts and I always enjoy reading them. I know my blog is bringing people back and some are new. I haven’t been doing this too long so I will be patient and let people get to know me better. I appreciate you my friend!
Friends 4 Life!
Well said… and thank you very much for such useful tips. Keep up the good work and more power!
that is tru friend.
and i will use it.
thanks
Good list… I particularly like #4. I use the YARPP plugin. That works great too.
I also really like the wordpress popular posts plugin for directing traffic to some of your best posts.
all the above tips are very reasonable, but the most important is to write articles that actually informative.
thanks for share it and keep the good work
great post:
its such a good topic with solutions .i need like this blog we are daily uses of blog comments and top comments.thanks a lot
Nice tips buddy for keeping the readers stick to your blog for a longer time. cheers..:0
I have been selling advertising space on my blog. Does anyone one know, from experience, if this hurts or helps keep people around on the site longer?
Well, great tips. Let me one little observation. Not in every case people spending more time on your blog generates more money. If you earn money from advertisements, bounce traffic always generates more traffic. Returning users click less time on ads than one-time visitors.
#1, #4, and #7 are the best ones I think in this post. All of the listed items are great info as well. Great information. Especially # 7, there is nothing more I hate4 then when you go to a site try and do something ad get some random error because their site doesn’t work properly. There are so many blogs out there it is important to keep what people you have and get more!
Wow, these are really excellent tips to keep you readers intact. I am bookmarking this write-up.
Nice tips. I think that another good tip would be encouraging people to comment by offering some prizes to the top commentators like money, free downloads, ads, etc. This will be great because people will begin to write more comments and the simple visitors, who do not comment, will stay more time on your blog, by reading all the comments.
Hey Lindagr,
Please elaborate more regarding the prize give aways. Even I have seen some blogs starting to give some giveaways in order to make it more popular. Not a bad idea to get few more readers by spending some bucks..
According to me, the best things to share with visitors is fresh topic. This is my personal experience is, when you give them something new, they will more attract to your blog. I always prefer to share new techniques, new data and latest happening to particular industry. its really work.
The best aspect which I like is writing well structured blog posts. Fantastic article.