Once you start writing and regularly posting articles to your own website or blog, you can take your article marketing to the next level by constantly tweaking your site to improve your website’s bounce rate.
I explained how to understand your bounce rate statistics in a previous article, but to describe it in its simplest terms – your bounce rate is the number of people who visit and leave your home page in one single visit. They come, they scan the page, they leave. That’s a bounce. But that’s not what we want. The higher your bounce rate – the worse that is for you.
Instead, we want visitors to come by our home page, read and click, read and click, and get deeper and deeper into our site. This keeps our visitors reading, engaged, and learning more about us and what types of information we are “experts” on. Plus – it of course increases your chances of the visitor buying from you in the future. When people stay on a site and read deeper into your articles — that is what’s called a “sticky site”. You’re keeping visitors glued into the site. Now that’s what we want!
So how do I improve my bounce rate, Lisa?
Well, there are several really easy things you can implement today to improve your site’s bounce rate and keep visitors on site:
1. Make sure you have implemented the “similar posts” wordpress plugin, if you have a wordpress blog (and you should:) You can tell this plugin in the settings to add similar post titles at the bottom of each post or in the sidebars. I actually do both.
2. Add interactive features such as polls or surveys on your site. I like to use PollDaddy made by the creators of WordPress. It’s free and pretty powerful. You can create polls for your site to keep it nice and “sticky” or survey your list. (To improve your bounce rate, you will actually need to link to your poll or survey from the home page so that visitors go deeper into your site).
3. Add links to related articles in the body of your article. For example, in the second paragraph of this article, I mention another article which I wrote about understanding what a bounce rate statistic is. Folks who click on that link will be reading another article I have written and then probably come back to this original article. That’s how you keep visitors on the site longer and improve your bounce statistic. As long as they have left the home page to visit another – your rate improves.
4. Make page titles in your navbar enticing. They typical home and about us navigation links aren’t going win you any additional clicks – but simple changes can improve that. Making your about link more personal can entice a click (Meet Lisa vs. About Us). You can do the same thing with other links in your navabar as well.
5. Something I am working on, and that I’ve seen work really well, is grouping articles together and promoting them on the home page as a quick start guide – or intro guide. Sometimes visitors to your site are very new to your topic and can be overwhelmed with the information. They want to be directed on where to start first. I’ve seen this done really well on the problogger and GlazerKennedy sites.
Do you have some keeping your site “sticky” suggestions. Share ’em with us…
Lisa Angelettie
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