Increasing Blog Pageviews

June 10, 2006

Pageviews per visitor are an extremely helpful metric to show the usefulness of our information to the market. The longer we keep a visitor at our website reading pages provides several benefits:

• Greater chance they will purchase/provide lead – it takes anywhere from 7-14 interactions with a customer before they typically make a purchase. Hopefully we may compress those interactions with a bevy of knowledge that holds the user at our site and reinforces the intended action we next wish them to take.
• Improves their perception of the blogger as an expert – This is just common sense, but a person would not likely read 10 pages on my marketing site if they thought I was a complete idiot… unless I showed my idiocy in an entertaining way.
• Tells us that we may be able to drill deeper into current topics – I started an affiliate site pushing a product. I noticed that users were spending an unusually long time reading my couple pages of reviews. I made more articles covering areas of this product in greater depth to meet this apparent need for more information and my sales doubled.

So how do we keep visitors at our site longer? Give them more eye candy. By using teasers on the index, or first page of our blog, we show the reader several posts to choose from.

When I showed each post in its entirety, a visitor would look at the scrollbar on the right-side of the screen and see that the visible area of the screen only represented a tiny fraction of the contents of this entire page. They wouldn’t know immediately that there were many posts on the page and might think, “Wow! This guy is long-winded. I don’t have time to read this.”

In WordPress there are several ways to do this. We can use the excerpt feature or we can use the “more” tag. I usually use the latter. It appears in the quicktags menu bar.

Just place the “more” tag where you want the excerpt to cut off. WordPress will then insert a link to the rest of your article. Other large blogging software packages offers similar options. Blogger is a bit different.