You have invested a lot of time and effort, and probably money, in getting visitors to come along to your webpage and find what you have to say, so the last thing you want is for them to leave after just reading the one page.
OK, if after one page they click on a PPC advert, you have made a slight return, but the ideal is that they read a few pages, subscribe to your newsletter or RSS feed and then click your PPC add or other banner. That way, they might just come back again and make you more money. So what methods can you be using?
Don’t Baffle With Too Many Adverts
Well, to begin with, don’t frighten them off with advertising and as an alternative steer them through your blog. A lot of baffling, flashing, blinking add units, tied in with other distractions such as pointless animations may amuse you as the owner, but will put visitors off your blog and scare them away.
Instead, use one or two add positions at most. Let these merge into your scheme rather than stand out to grab their attention. This way they will add to your site, not distract from it. Maybe a CPC unit along with a couple of neatly matching sponsored adds.
steer Your visitors To Their Next Reading
So you are now scaring your traffic off less, but how do you retain them more? You guide them around the blog to the next point of interest. You can do this by appling in post links, or there are WordPress plugins to automatically do this job for you.
Give Them A Choice When They Finish Reading
But take a look around the screen for yourself and think, if you had just discover the post, where would you go next? To get around this puzzle, download a related posts plugin and install this, with the links placed at the bottom of the post. This way, as the reader reaches the end of the post they are furnished with some similar articles to continue reading about.
Popularity, Not Recent
Also, take a look at your list of most recent articles, on every page. That doesn’t in reality give any real benefit to your readers. It shows your recent work, but if you haven’t written for a few days, what exactly are you showing off? Also, for new site visitors to your web publication, they haven’t read any other posts yet, so you don’t want to show them your most recent posts, you want to show them your best posts.
How you define best posts is debatable. You may prefer to work this out yourself and create the list, but I prefer to use one of the excellent plugins available. If your blog receives a lot of comments, then you may choose a popular posts plugin based on comments. Else, there are pluggins available that work based on views.
By removing the list of recent posts and replacing with most popular votes, you are steering your traffic to your best work.
Get Them To Stay Longer
So, to get traffic to stay on your blog longer, don’t distract with banners and loads of adverts, give them something to read when they get to the bottom of the post and show off your best work. It is all about keeping them interested and pushing them where you want to go.
Author Resource:
Written by Keith Lunt, of http://www.janric.co.uk . If you want more ideas, call into our blog .
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