The answer to most questions about attracting readers to your business blog is “create excellent content”. While this is undoubtedly true, extra techniques are always useful in the challenge to attract readers’ attention and then get them to engage with your content. Here are a few simple ways to defeat the dreaded bounce rate, get your reader to put up their feet and stay awhile:
Interlinking
Put simply, interlinking is the linking of relevant words in your post to other posts that offer richer information on that topic. Aim to create a distinct and consistent interlinking style. Some blogs, such as CopyBlogger, use interlinking extensively within each post, but I recommend linking in moderation and only where it adds true value.
You’ll notice that WordPress encourages interlinking by offering a search button when you create hyperlinks. Be sure to only link to articles that are relevant and add something to the new/current post.
Analyse low bounce-rate pages
You can learn a lot from your own analytics data. Check into Google Analytics and follow Navigate to Content>Site Content>Pages. Here, you can see the pages that have racked up the most page views over the last month. Identify which pages have the lowest bounce rates and review what you did on these posts to get readers to click through to other pages on your website. Armed with this information, try to replicate the process in future posts.
Improve the most popular pages first
While harnessing your Google Analytics data, review which pages have the highest bounce rates yet the highest page views. Try to model what seems to be working on your low bounce rate pages on these popular pages to encourage greater engagement.
Use widgets
Examples of widgets you can use alongside business blog content in the sidebar are “Popular posts”, “Recent Posts” and “Random Posts”. You’ll need to road-test widgets to see which work best for your blog; there are pros and cons to each. For instance, Recent Post widgets are great for showcasing your freshest content, but the best posts can get buried and forgotten simply because they are old. Random Posts can be excellent for promoting posts that may be overlooked by Popular and Recent widgets, keeping your site content fresh and dynamic at each visit.
The slide plug-in
This neat plug-in tool creates a pop-up that slides into the lower right-hand corner of the screen, displaying another blog post relevant to that being viewed, with accompanying social share buttons. Ideally, the tool encourages readers to discover other content within your website, as well as help it to go viral.
The Pushing Social blog reports that using the plug-in increased its page views instantly by 11.6%. These are promising figures, but you need to consider whether your audience may have a strong, preconceived aversion to pop-ups in general.
We have covered just 5 simple ways to make blogs more engaging. Have you found other ways to encourage your readers to stick around your business blog? Share your experiences along with your blog url in the comments section.
