Turn More Users Over and Increase Pageviews
Who wouldn’t love more readers and more pages viewed per user with the same traffic? This is about optimizing your articles and the extra information displayed around them to turn more readers into subscribers and the typical user to view at least one more page.
Be Obvious
Step one: know your goal and don’t hide from it. You want people to subscribe to your RSS feed. There are some typical tricks, some including:
- Have the subscription options, including comments, email, etc… above the fold.
- Offer full feeds.
- Promote your feed like mad in posts.
- Have options at the end of every post.
- Link to your feed in comments.
I’d just like to take a second to discuss that last one. Linking to your feed in other site’s comments is a bad idea. I’ve seen some other sites talking about that as of late, but who thought of that first? Well, unless you know anyone who explicitly mentioned it before March 31st, it was me 
So all that stuff is a good start, but you just want the reader to know that you want them to add your feed to their reader. Simple.
Related Posts, Archived Posts, Best Posts and Favourite Posts
The more links to posts you have on your page at any time, the better. You might display the 15 most recent posts, 5 popular ones, 5 of your favourites, 5 random ones and a bunch related to a single article. These are just ways to get more content in the reader’s face.
You can increase the pages viewed per user by offering them more page to go to. Most users come to a single post, not your home page. Whether it be from an RSS reader, search engine, other site or whatever- chances are they’re viewing a single post. This is why with my recent design changed I really optimized my single post page.
On any given post I link up to 30 internal articles throughout the page. I do not have under 2 pages per user a day, ever. Usually it’s much higher, and Alexa guesses around 5.5. That’s pretty good, but you can only find out if this will work for you if you try it.
Optimize the Bacon Bringers
There are a couple posts on every blog- at least one- that really bring in the views everyday. If you don’t have one, don’t worry. You’ll write one eventually. These posts either get huge links or, in the case of mine, lots of SE love.
My post “How to Change Icons in OS X” has received thousands of views over the time it’s been posted. A couple hundred come from tutorial websites, but that died down after about a week. What really helps is that it gets up to 50 or 60 hits a day! Those are high days, but seeing this, I optimized the page to either:
- Get the reader to view another page.
- Get the reader to subscribe.
- If all else fails, use the article to their advantage and leave happy. Not every one needing to change icons on their Macs are looking for tips on blogging and my design ramblings.
Just a simple piece at the top of the article should do. I added a dash of colour to mine, but your design preferences are up to you. Plus adding HTML into the WordPress editor is a bitch.
When All Else Fails
If you can’t seem to get things done, just remember: above the fold is good. Some user’s “folds” are bigger than others, but get all the good stuff in the fold of your top resolution. There are exceptions, though. For example, my screen res top 3:
- 1280*1024, 21%
- 1024*768, 21%
- 1280*800, 16%
This means my fold to aim for is about the 768 region, because the two shorter screens combine for more than anything else. Also, for the stats junkies, I get less than 1% 800*600
Leave a comment
David Hopkins
September 6th, 2007 at 3:34 PM
Some good ideas there, Connor. Another tip for getting more ‘bacon bringer’ from the search engines is to write posts on programming that is sparsely covered. There are plenty of technologies and PHP function sets that have been around for years and have still remained relitivly undocumented. I have recently been replacing my regex templating engine with a DOM-XSL one and there is very little documentation on what can be a very problematic technology.
Unfortunatly for all the graphic designers, there are not so many options.
Mathew
September 6th, 2007 at 7:06 PM
That’s some outstanding advice there., the above-the-fold advice especially is something I’ll be taking on board when I finally find the time to sort my own blog out
Daniel Johnson
September 6th, 2007 at 7:48 PM
Linking to your best content is definetly a great idea. I like to use only 3 good articles but have large images which really catch the eye. That way you are bound to persuade someone into staying on the site.
Andy
September 6th, 2007 at 10:55 PM
Completely agree with you David. I had a friend write an article on Ruby and XML parsing I believe which proved very popular in the search engines.
Adam McKerlie
September 6th, 2007 at 11:12 PM
I had never thought about the “Above the fold” thing. Its very interesting though and I’m definitely going to have to think about it.
Whats a good plugin for doing related posts? I’ve been looking but I haven’t found any yet.
Connor Wilson
September 7th, 2007 at 6:45 AM
I use UTW (Ultimate Tag Warrior) for tagging my posts, and it facilitates my related posts and tag cloud as well.
David J
September 8th, 2007 at 1:38 PM
I always try to include at least an image in each post above the fold. It makes the post more exciting, rather than just a wall of text.
Adam, check out the related entries plugin (http://wasabi.pbwiki.com/Related%20Entries), I use it on my blog and it seems to work pretty well.
Mike
September 11th, 2007 at 2:45 PM
just wanted to say no one should use 800 by 600! I fall into the 1280*1024 category!
Acopic Web Design
September 24th, 2007 at 6:45 AM
I notice that there are a few networks springing up which work by displaying your post title on other blogs in exchange for the same on your blog. Personally I think this kind of thing will only harm blogging in general. Write good articles and you’ll get some traffic.
Acopic Web Design
September 24th, 2007 at 6:48 AM
Just remembered the name of the service I mentioned above - Blogrush. Blogrush DOT com
Connor Wilson
September 24th, 2007 at 6:50 AM
Yeah, I totally agree. It’s just another tacky widget promising something people can’t get themselves.
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