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I am guilty.
I admit it.
I sent people away from Blogging From Paradise Dot Com for years.
Why?
I just wanted people to buy stuff then bounce.
Why?
I wanted my blog to be 100% passive profit.
But something funny happened along the way.
I realized that keeping people onsite made bank.
Facebook, Google and X became money-making machines by reeling in users and keeping them addicted. Oops; I mean, by keeping them engaged. Meaning these billions stick around to do stuff that nets titanic fortunes. Talk. Engage. Read content. Use content. Click ads. Buy stuff. Yadda, yadda, yadda…..
Every person onsite for an increasing time amplifies your success by:
- accessing your truly helpful content
- engaging content
- buying stuff
- hiring you
- setting up a referral traffic scenario
- setting up a referral business scenario
You need them NOT to leave to keep them onsite.
Captain Obvious Alert aside…….every one of you bloggers sends people away fast consistently. Guaranteed. I know it. I visit your blogs. No sense being shy about it or looking away from the issue. I condemn no one. But you and I harbor plenty of unconscious fears scaring us into hiding our blogs….or at the very least, doing stuff that sets up barriers to prevent people from spending a long time on our blogs.
I do it too.
People will always leave our blog for any reason based on personal preferences, grievances and tender inner weaknesses from the past. This is a nice way of saying some will never prefer your blog or you for one of a million reasons.
But we can greatly influence these factors by doing stuff to lower our blog bounce rate.
What is your blog bounce rate?
How quickly visitors leave your blog.Â
Picture the rate at which they bounce on out of there.
The blogging world perceives a high bounce rate as being bad and a low bounce rate as being good.
First you figure out why they leave so quickly.
Correct that error.
Increase time spent onsite.
Amplify your success.
Follow these tips to lower your blog bounce rate.
1: Publish Long Form Blog Posts
Publish detailed blog posts to keep people onsite.
Long form content puts rear ends on your blog for a while.
Lowering your bounce rate gets easy if readers stick around for minutes to:
- read
- digest
blog posts.
Look closely at this post. Scanners come and go pronto.
But real readers hellbent on extracting as much value-juice as possible remain firmly planted on Blogging From Paradise Dot Com for minutes to process the sucker. That lowers my bounce rate.
Practical Tips
- aim for 1200-1500 words
- list practical steps to solve a specific problem
- format posts for easy reading and scanning
- toss in multi-media here and there to make your blog sticky
2: Cover One Niche to Develop Topical Authority
Do one thing to do it well.
Develop topical authority to lasso readers and keep ’em around.
I figure this to be an underrated tip for lowering your blog bounce rate. Every blogger thinks about what to do not what to BE to make readers stick around your blog.
Being a niche leader instantly arrests attention spans.
How the thought process goes: someone perceives your topical authority and decides to spend some time browsing through blog posts. Why? According to them, you cover a topic inside-out so you must know your stuff. Knowing your stuff makes your blog worth some time, in their eyes, at least.
Choose one blogging niche. Tackle that topic from as many angles as possible. Be thorough. Be a leader.
Establish topical authority to make your blog worth their time.
Your blog becomes like glue to those who crave your expertise.
3: Open Comments
I really have no clue if an easier way to lower your bounce rate exists.
I recently opened blog comments again on Blogging From Paradise after 3 years. People stopped by, read posts and a few lowered my bounce rate by dropping detailed comments.
But do you know who else lowers my bounce rate?
Comment lurkers.
Human beings sometimes read comments without commenting. I do this on YouTube. You likely do it, too.
Every comment lurker lowers my bounce rate. Combine this crowd with actual commentors and you begin to see why it makes sense to keep blog comments open.
Follow these steps:
- give readers one blog link (aka enable the field for readers to paste their blog home page)
- read and reply to comments within 24 hours
- publish detailed, authentic replies to comments when appropriate (aka when the individual asks a question requiring an in-depth reply)
- nest threads to keep the engagement train going for multiple replies to the same post
Be active in this area.
Keep people onsite by reading and replying to comments within 24 hours or so. If life intervenes you can pull back. But responding within a day tends to keep readers around while firmly planting other readers in front of comments, all parties lowering the blog bounce rate.
Blog comments do not pay you money but keep people onsite which eventually pays you money.
Think beyond the average blogger to move beyond the average blogger.
4: Remove Everything that Raises Your Bounce Rate
Like:
- pop up forms
- heavy dynamic ads
- asking/telling/begging readers to sign up for stuff, or to do anything for you, via ad intrusive ad copy and/or graphics, embeds, etc.
Crunch images.
Or limit image usage if posts do not lend themselves to a large volume of embeds.
Imagine being a reader who clicks on a link to get practical blog content but pop-ups, slow-loading ads and other elements serve as stout barriers to the content-promise. Most leave. A few put up with it and stick around. A tiny percentage does follow your call to action.
But is your job to get something from a tiny percentage of people?
Or is it to make a large, loyal group of targeted people happy who increase your:
- referral traffic?
- referral income?
Be smart.
Make people happy by quickly giving them what they want so they refer your blog and online business to their growing tribes who visit your blog and buy your stuff……..and then those loyal followers and customers refer your blog and online business to their growing tribes……and so on.
5: Make Your Blog a Free Helpful Resource (Largely) Not a Running Commercial
Irony alert; as I write this post I am migrating my online course for sale and eBooks for sale from pages to posts.
I am hardly blasting each. Yet the posts seem to be a bit of a running commercial. Temporarily at least.
Yet 99% of the content on my blog is:
- free
- detailed
- in-depth
- practical
because I intend to make Blogging From Paradise a resource not exclusively an online store.
Sell a tiny bit.
Teach a lot.
Content builds fortunes.
Hawkers burn out and quit by sending people away from their site.
Conclusion
Keep people around by following these tips.
Build community loyalty.
Stop sending folks to the cyber hills.
Your Turn
How do you lower your bounce rate?
What tips can you add?
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