6 Crucial Ways to Keep Readers Onboard
Brilliant Design: Provide An Amazing Experience
This is a guest post by Aminul Islam Sajib. If you're interested in getting in front of the readers of Site Sketch 101, check out the guest posting guidelines here.
You’ve worked hard to create content for your blog. You’ve desperately worked to bring viral traffic to your blog. You leave comments on others’ blog, you participate in the conversation, and you leave your sites URL on forums. You email your friends and colleagues with a link to your site and newest post. Sometimes you even spend money to advertise on other sites to try and get traffic back to your site.
But all these things fail when your visitors don’t stay very long at your blog.
The bounce rate may be frustrating to you; however, there are a couple of things you can do to make sure that your readers don’t leave your blog once they are there.
Here are 6 tips that will make it harder for your readers to leave your blog once they get there.
Arrange Your Sidebar Wisely
Arrange your sidebar only with necessary and useful widgets. Place a widget that shows the most recent posts. Also you can use a widget that contains all the categories and tags you blog on.
A lot of people fill the sidebar with lots of advertisements and referral buttons. Remember that theses are links away from your site. Don’t use a lot of useless widgets and advertisements on your site. When using widgets make sure that they are pertinent to your site.
Categorize Your Posts
Whenever someone I know is about to start a blog, I contact them to give a few pieces of advice that I’ve learned in my overall blogging experience.
One of the most important things I advise new bloggers to do is to create categories before they start writing a post. This makes your writing motivated and straight to the point on the topic you are writing about. This way you can place your posts under relevant categories.When you place your articles in categories your readers can check out the other articles related to the categories that they are interested in.
Show Related Posts
This is another important tip. Never ever forget to include “Related Posts on this topic” at the end of each of your posts. This will allow your readers access to other posts in your archives that are related to this topic. There are a lot of plugins available out there which allows you to do this easily with just a few clicks.
Have an Archive
Create an archive page with a link to it from your homepage along with a list of all other pages such as “About”, “contact”, etc. Browsing your archive allows readers to go deeper into your blog’s zone. Once they’ve found your blog interesting. While exploring through the archive, chances are they will find something to read. Why should you miss the chance to have them read more of your posts?
Most themes have a built-in archive page. To create an archive page, simply “Add New Page” and under the right panel “Attributes”, you will find a drop-down box titled as “Templates”. Select “Archives” from that and publish the page. It’s that simple.
Link in-between
If you are a Copyblogger reader, you may have noticed how they link inside their posts with other posts published earlier. It’s a great way to make your readers stop their surfing at your blog and dive into your blog sea. Always try to find out if there’s something relevant inside your new post that you may link to an older post. This is a great way to keep readers onboard.
Let them Subscribe
Once a reader is satisfied or impressed with your content, they will look for a way to get themselves engaged with your blog. This is the golden moment for you. Keep in mind that this patience of subscribing to your blog doesn’t stay long. So, you need to make sure that readers can subscribe to your blog either via RSS reader or email newsletter in a quick and easy way.
To sum it up, your blog’s layout plays an important role while you may think only your theme does. Customize your blog in a nice, simple, gorgeous, and effective way that interacts with readers’ mind and keeps them onboard.
Aminul Islam Sajib
Aminul Islam Sajib is the author and creator of Life with Technology, a blog about technology, blogging tips and the latest in social media news. Follow him on twitter @aisajib or Facebook. Aminul Islam Sajib has 2 post(s) at Site Sketch 101
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27 Vibrant Comments
I would love to hear yours!
Eric B. said:
These are some great points. Once you get users to your site, your next step is to get them to explore a bit, and possibly even subscribe.
I try to follow many of these tips. Adding links to previous posts within your content is an especially good way of getting users to navigate around your site more.
But I don’t completely agree with adding links to your latest posts to your sidebar. They’re already displayed on your home page, you don’t need to display them again in the sidebar. Instead, I like to add a list of some of my favourite posts in my sidebar.
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Aminul Islam Sajib said:
Dear Eric B. Thanks for your comment. Let me tell you the fact that readers are what you need to keep on board by doing whatever possible. All of your visitors don’t come uniquely at your homepage. They may fall into a post, probably from search engine result. In case he is the first time visitor to your blog, he is not likely to check out your homepage. But if you get a “Recent Posts” widget at your sidebar, he’ll have a look at your recent headlines and is likely to check them out if headline interests him (Recommended: A Cock-and-Bull Story can drive traffic). On the other hand, 95% chances that they will leave after they read the specific post they had come through.
Keep in mind, readers are impatient, have no time, and extremely busy. So, you need to make navigation as much easier as possible. Adding recent headlines in sidebar is one of the greatest ways for the betterment of your site’s navigation.
I hope that by now you got my point. Thanks again for reading.
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Eric B. said:
While I do agree that not all users will come from the home page, and that listing posts in the sidebar is a way to bring them in deeper.
But new != best. Unless you can put 100% effort into every single post, you’re going to have some previous posts that are better than your latest ones. That’s why you should put your best content forward, not just what’s new.
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Deepika said:
Nice list of points all blogger should follow…I agree with Eric…
Already last posts are in our home page so we can keep random posts or most popular posts or our favourite posts in the sidebar.
We can also use few user friendly plugins like Top Commentator plugin, Comment Luv, Recent Commentators Plugin.This encourage our readers.
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Aminul Islam Sajib said:
Thanks Deepika for your comment. Please read my reply to the above comment. I’ve written why a widget containing recent headlines is important for a blog.
Top Commentators and CommentLuv are two of the greatest plugins I’ve found so far that is extremely useful for increasing readers’ comments. However, you don’t need a plugin for recent comments, as wordpress by default provides you with a built-in Recent Comment widget.
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Keith said:
I don’t have the option in my theme to make an archive page, maybe Wordpress has a plugin for that….
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Aminul Islam Sajib said:
I think there is no plugin for an archive page template, though I’m not sure. Maybe there is.
What I suggest you to do is to search for a tutorial describing how to create an archive page template. Believe me, it’s so easy to create an archive page for wordpress blog.
However, I recommend that you do it by yourself only if you are comfortable messing up with php and theme files.
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Glen said:
I never really thought about linking to other things I’ve written inside a post.
That’s an excellent idea.
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Aminul Islam Sajib said:
Glad to see that I’ve succeeded to give you some brand new ideas.
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Lee Ka Hoong said:
We can call this post as “How To Make Your Blog Sticky”. Blog structure is really important to keep a visitor and keep them returning your blog and read other posts. The ways you listed are very useful and many people find them useful, I have been doing this for quite some times too.
Theme design plays an important role too, whenever I visit a blog and the theme design is bad, then I rarely visit it for 2nd time, I believe that most of the people will do the same too.
Anyway, nice points you have here Aminul!
Best Regards,
Lee
Aminul Islam Sajib said:
Thanks for your comment, Lee. I do the same thing. If a blog’s theme doesn’t attract me, I rarely visit that even if that has some great stuffs to read. I wanted to say at the end of my post that your theme is important, but not less than how it is customized.
Pablo said:
Good post. The biggest thing is to keep the readers engaged. Today blog visitors are smart enough to know if the content is valuable and useful as opposed to some rehashed post that’s appeared numerous times across the net. It’s tough to be original with all that’s out there, but write with your heart.
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Ron Leyba said:
I think you accidentally repeated the first two sentences at the beginning of your post sir.!
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Aminul Islam Sajib said:
Oh, yes, you are right. It wasn’t like that when the post was published. I can no longer edit this post. Nick should take care of this.
Thank you very much for drawing my attention onto that. I appreciate it.
Nicholas Cardot said:
Aminul Islam Sajib » I just took care of it. Sorry about that and thanks for bringing it to my attention.
Davor Gasparevic @ Cheap internet marketing ebooks blog said:
Well, definitely a place for me to improve, since I don’t utilize all of this mentioned above.
I have 5-15 subscribers (the number is fluctuating all the time) which tells me that I am doing at least some of these things right.
However, my next blog will be WordPress for sure, a little bit of extra hassle learning to use it is I think more than worth of its benefits.
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Aminul Islam Sajib said:
Absolutely. It is wrong if anyone says that if you use wordpress, you can’t learn coding. In fact, if you use wordpress, eventually you will be learning PHP codes, just like I am learning these days.
sernan said:
nice article here, but i was wondering how can you get your readers subscribe to your posts? Not sure how to do that, coz basically, i have been asking some friends if they visit a blog or is interested on the article, do they subscribe to the rss feeds? 1 out of 10 people do… i think most people especially the not savvy peeps does not know what it is…
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Aminul Islam Sajib said:
There comes the necessity of Email subscription. For the situation you’ve described above, I’d advise two ways.
1. Have the “Subscribe for Email updates” widget/form at the sidebar, so that non-savvy people can get themselves connected with your blog.
2. Create a “Subscribe” page, and write a detailed instruction on how they can take advantage of many different RSS feeds by using Google Reader.
Hope that helps you.
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sernan said:
Thanks aminul for the tips, i’ll try to follow them…
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Nicholas Cardot said:
sernan » For more information about leading people towards your subscription options be sure to check out this article http://www.sitesketch101.com/fine-art-leading-readers
jess said:
That reminds me to add a “Email Subscriber” thingy on my blog. I swear I got everything else but that.
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Aminul Islam Sajib said:
Most people don’t subscribe for Email updates. But some people, the number is not too little, though, do subscribe. To make it convenient for them to get my posts, I don’t forget to put an Email subscription box at the sidebar of each pages/posts of my blog.
Wish you all the best, jess.
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Nicholas Cardot said:
jess » Make it look good so that it invites people to use it.
Ron Leyba said:
A decent article. And the subscriber thing, either by email or rss is a must on every blog.
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Rose said:
Aminul I enjoyed your post. You offer some great points to consider.
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Derek Jensen said:
When looking at these 6 ways comprehensively, I have found Site Sketch 101, Blogussion, and ProBlogger to be the main blogs that incorporate all of these crucial ways to keeping readers onboard.
They offer all of these ways like recent posts, certain categorical posts, popular posts, and any speciality items all within close ‘reach’ while on the homepage.