My first project in the Haunt Jaunts Monetizing Project (HJMP) is improving my stats. Javier Ortega stresses that a lot in his book Paranormal Gold. Along with “Content is king,” which is probably the thing he stressed most.
I have decent content. (Don’t get me wrong. That can always stand improving.) But my hits have steadily increased. Not into the thousands like Javier’s numbers, but they’ve climbed.
I know better content and maybe more focus on SEO will help that. That’s something I’ll implement in Step 2. But for now I’m concerned with my bounce rate. Which, until Javier explained it in his book, I didn’t understand the importance of.
I check my Google Analytic stats regularly. Javier’s book explains why this is not only a good thing, but crucial to a blog’s success. However, understanding the numbers and working with them is even better. And while you mostly want high stats (i.e. for hits and such) there’s one that you want as low as possible: your bounce rate.
My bounce rate on Haunt Jaunts is a rather high 75%. So I’ve taken a couple of key steps to reduce it:
- Blog Redesigned - My friend Nathan from A State of Mind has had me thinking about this one for a while now. He suggested I remove some widgets from my sidebars and make things less cluttered. Trouble is, I’m a bit of a pack rat. I had a hard time parting with some things. (Even though I knew he was right.) However, both he and Javier’s blog, GhostTheory, get great hits. I analyzed their blogs. In addition to minimal widgets, they’re also both set up in a magazine-style. I’ve been eyeing that option for a while now. After reading Paranormal Gold I finally decided to implement it. Why? Because I don’t “give it up” all on the first page. If you want to read an article, you have to click through.
- Lead Them to the Blog, Not Away – This also kind of goes with #1. I think it’s why Nathan suggested I take down some of my widgets. So many of them lead people away. Nathan, as do I, subscribes to the “give out information” rule of blogging. I thought by being a place with links to ghost tours, other paranormal sites, etc I was providing useful info. I was, but now I understand why Nathan suggested if I want to keep those things to create a separate page for them. It’s all about the Bounce Rate. Unwittingly I was encouraging readers to go elsewhere instead of checking out my site more. So I took down some of the widgets and replaced them with ones that will direct people to other stories within my blog.
We’ll see how this works. If my Bounce Rate stays high, then I have to go back to Square 1 (which comes even before Step 1) and focus on Javier’s suggestion for the best foundation of any blog: content. Because at the end of the day it appears the bounce rate is the best indicator of how good a blog’s content is.
PUT IT IN PRACTICE
Do you know your bounce rate?
What steps do you take to keep it low?
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