I recently had a conversation with a member of WordPress Goldmine about their high bounce rate. People were coming to the site reading the article and then going elsewhere. When I looked at their blog they had no recent posts in the sidebar, they listed no related posts and people weren’t encouraged to read anything else on the blog.
A few quick changes later and the bounce rate dropped significantly.
On this blog all the posts with the highest number of comments are ones where I ask people to tell me what they think. See a trend here?
A few years ago the joke about twitter was that it was full of people posting things like ”Having a Shower” “Eating Toast and peanut butter” why do you think that was? Could it have been that the question they asked in the posting box was.. What are you doing? They later changed it to Whats Happening? and now it says Post a New Tweet.
The whole point of this is that before you write a post or before you even set up a blog you need to know what you want to achieve and then design the post or blog around that.
If for example I had a post that I wrote a year ago that got me a load of facebook likes then I would probably write a follow up to that post and point you to the original post. The chances are I would get more likes. If I wanted people to sign up to a list I would give information then maybe include a video and a link for further information that was available after a signup.
If I wanted to get some traffic from Pinterest well then I’d probably just do this;
With planning and design you can help your readers do what you want them to do. But first you need to know what direction you want them to go in 🙂
