Making Your Blog Sticky

How long do your visitors stay on your blog? The difference in the rate of bounces and stickiness will have a direct impact on how much money you make. Not to sound too greedy here, but hey it's the internet.

Bounce rate - A Bounce occurs when a website visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages before a certain session timeout elapses.

Sticky content - Sticky content refers to content published on a website, which has the purpose of getting a user to return to that particular website. Webmasters use this method to build up a community of returning visitors to a website. {Wikipedia definitions}

A lot has already been debated on how you can make your blog sticky. I'm not going to tell you what to write and how to make more sensational titles or articles. Instead I'll tell you how you should do some homework on your statistics. Just don't become statistic zombies, OK.

Now, given that everyone uses different analytical tools to view their traffic, I'm just going to go with the one I use which is Statcounter. First of, it is always good too know which of your content is being visited the most and Why? To find out go into your "Popular Pages" category, if available, and see the popularity of your articles by the number of visitors coming to each page. Statcounter also give me options as to how I would like to drill down my data and view the type of keywords and/or incoming links that a particular page is getting traffic for.

Now that you know from where and how your visitors are coming, you get a feeling for what is popular in your niche. For example, if you blog about knitting and your most popular page is for summertime knits have a look at the amount of time a visitor coming from a search query spends on that page.

This is how you convert those casual visitors into repeat ones and long time readers. Go back to your popular articles and update them at least once or twice a month. It's best to make a Top 10 list of your articles and go through them one by one. What do you update though? Well depending on the type of search queries you get you can adjust your articles accordingly.

If your article on summertime knits is getting search queries for "summertime knit patterns" but you don't have any information on that post for that particular topic, a good idea would be to add information on patterns to benefit from the traffic coming your way. {This could be a reason why many visitors might be bouncing off your content} Chances are you will get visitors to stay longer and the difference in new visitors and repeat visitors could decrease significantly. Why? Simply because you updated your content to address their needs. Remember to include the date of the last update, that will let visitors know you're listening.

You could also add affiliate links or PPC ads to monetize traffic. This would further enhance your content with relevancy, just don't over do it.

As your popular content gets updated search engines would keep re-indexing your posts as freshness persists. Meaning more new visitors and more stickiness.

Though the trick to making it sticky is in the way you write your content. Don't try to sell from the get go in an effort to make them click on an Ad, you're just losing them that way. Remember you want them to come back, not leave forever.

Related posts:

1. Making Money From a Blog – January Details
2. Will Your Blog Survive Without Social Sites?
3. 5 More Ways to Increase Blog Rankings and Traffic
4. 5 ways to increase your blog rankings
5. Spend Time Blogging Wisely – It is an Investment