How to make visitors stay longer at your blog

Do you want visitors to stay longer at your blog and browse through more pages? If so, then consider the following suggestions :

1. Provide valuable content:
This is a no-brainer and is the first and foremost condition to make people want to stay longer at your site and even come back to it later. If they are fed with rubbish, it takes them less than a second to close down your site window or browse to some other hopefully better site.

Before posting any article on your blog, ask yourself : "What benefit does this post provide to my readers?" Then make sure your post provides the desired benefit to your readers. Keep doing this for some time and soon your blog may get a very loyal fan following.


2. Related Articles:
After good content, the next important thing would be to make your site easy to navigate so that people don't find visiting your site too inconvenient.

One thing I have done at my blog is to add 'Related Articles' section at the end of each of my blog posts. Earlier I did not make use of this technique but am happy with the results after this change.

Make a list of 4-5 similar or related articles from your own blog and provide links to each, at the end of all your articles. This list would provide useful direction to the user.

Rather than depend on the visitors to navigate your site by themselves, take them by the hand and guide them to areas of their interest.


3. Have more categories (tags):
If you look at the right hand side of my blog, you can see a list of categories. Try to make this list big so that people can easily find articles of their interest. Having more categories can improve the navigability of your site and save valuable time of your site visitors.


4. Have more specific tags:
While naming your categories (tags), be as specific as possible. Earlier I used to have a tag named 'self-improvement', but later I began to be more specific in naming my categories.

I still have self-improvement tag, but I also have further tags like 'people skills', 'stress', 'sleep n energy', 'success', 'writing n blogging', 'learning tips', 'public speaking' etc.

Instead of having 100+ articles under 'self-improvement', you now would have a few articles under specific sub-categories making it easier for site visitors to find articles of their interest.

Have more categories(as mentioned in tip #3 above) and be specific in labeling them. You can also make use of tag clouds to attract reader attention, like the one I have at the bottom of this blog. You may generate tag clouds free of cost through sites such as : www.zoomclouds.com, www.tagcloud.com


5. Involve the reader:
Make your site interactive by getting readers more involved while they are reading your articles. You can increase reader involvement by asking questions or getting the reader to think about a topic. You may have discussions on your site, encourage comments from readers and reply to those comments.

One more feature you can add to your blog that increases user involvement is to ask them to rate your articles on a scale of 1-5. You can install this rating feature for free from the site: www.blogarate.com You may notice that at the end of all my articles, there is an icon called 'Rate it'. Just click on any of the star to give your desired rating for my articles.


6. External links in new window:
You may want to provide links to other websites so that readers can get additional information about a topic. External links can be helpful in adding additional value to your content by pointing visitors in a useful direction. However, on my blog, I usually make external links open in a new window so that people do not leave my site even while browsing the other webpage.


7. Faster Loading:
One more important factor for your blog or website is the time-factor. Your site should not take forever to load up. Visitors may just not have the time, patience or the inclination to wait. I personally don't like sites which take a long time to load up due to heavy graphics and stuff present.

As far as I am concerned, a clean professional look and valuable content are far more important than catchy designs or heavy graphics. By no means am I suggesting to keep your site dull. Infact a good looking site can attract people. But do not over-do it.


The above tips may be helpful in making your visitors stay longer at your site. You may not notice dramatic results, but there should hopefully be satisfactory improvements after implementing these strategies.

Which of the above strategies were you already using on your blog or website and what has been the result of using that strategy?


Related Articles:
1.Write faster and better, 2.Tips for a good speech, 3.Improve concentration, 4.How to get the most out of a book, 5. Improve listening skill, 6.Make your business proposal heard

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