I am sure that most of you will use a counter or a stat system to monitor the activities of your readers and with the tools you are using, it will normally shows how long in average that your visitors stayed on your blog like the one below if you are using Google Analytics.
All of you in average stayed on my blog for about 4 minutes and I think this is quite reasonable as my blog is still new and most of my posts are not long. Some of you might have been noticing about this and chose to ignore it but I can tell you, this shows the readability and quality of your contents. Of course, all of us have come-and-go traffic which stayed for not even 5 seconds and also loyal readers who really read what you wrote, like Sean, yung ., and Monkey Wong in Wayne Liew Dot Com which they tagged me before.
I would like to share with you 5 things that will make your readers stay long and not close your page at the time they load your blog. This is important as if they are your first-time visitors, you would like them to stay a little longer and see what you offer, deciding whether to come back or not next time.
Consistency on quality of contents – Writing quality posts is always the key to bring in visitors. If you visitors and readers knew by mouth or through others’ recommendation that your contents are good, they will wait for a reasonable amount of time to look at what had attracted their friend to recommend them. This will mean that every article of yours will need to be consistent as you’ll never know when will a new visitor comes and what article is on top of you home page.
If you are using a self-hosted Wordpress blog, you can actually get to know what your best performing article is by using the Popularity Contest Plugin and try to emulate it in each of your posts as that may be what your readers love most.
Contents first, others second – As I always say, the main attraction of a blog is the contents. If your contents is good and attractive but people always gives the loading priority of you’re your blog to your sidebar which means your sidebar loads first before your contents.
This is an error you must evade because sidebar normally comprises of ad panels, widgets and third party contents that might take ages to load and by the time your contents start to load after time, the visitor is leaving. Do you want this to happen? If you are a web designer, you can try designing themes that give priority to the contents instead of the sidebar. If you are not, try choosing one which suits this criterion.
No auto-play digital media – If your blog is to aimed at just your friends and family, you can have the freedom to share your “favorites” but if your are aiming to get a huge readership base, don’t ever place an auto-play song or video in your blog. This will give your first-time readers a shock and I am sure you don’t want to harm your readers if they are using an earphone or humiliate them if they are blogging in the library.
Videos and audio clips are all right with me and there are blogs out there that became successful by just posting videos that they stumbled upon but don’t make it auto-play. When your visitors got panicked with it and can’t find where the song came out from, they will simple close the browser!
Advertisements on blogs – I know I have a lot of ad panels in my blog and I have lots of way to monetize my blog. This makes my blog looks somehow clean and not seemed to be clogged up with banner ads. When I get visit a blog, if five 468×60 banner ads greeted me, I will perceive it as a spam blog and spam blogs are not welcomed! This is just what people will think of it.
You should try different ad formats and place it in places where people are comfortable with and don’t make it become abundant! One warning for you if you are having pop-up, pop-under, interstitial ads in your blog, it irritates your readers, if not, me! Don’t try to monetise your blog with these unless you can guarantee that your visitors read your blog no matter what.
Slow load time – This is one thing that you can or can’t control at the same time. If your web host is just slow and always down, you should consider about switching your web host. The other aspect is the codes you use on your blog. If most parts of your blog are constructed by CSS, it will be lighter for a browser to loads and it will increase of how fast your blog loads.
You can check about the size of your blog by using this Web Page Analyser which analyse every attributes that form your page and the loading speed of your blog according to the speed of various modems. As you can see if you do a speed test for Wayne Liew Dot Com, I keep my blog size really low as for your knowledge, Wayne Liew Dot Com is hosted on a US server and to make it loads faster (for Malaysian readers), I need to keep the numbers low.
Is there anything that you got pissed off when you visit a blog that is not featured and explained up there? Blog about it and let me know by linking it here or leave me a comment. At last, did my site piss you off? Be honest, I won’t do anything to you. 
{ 26 comments… read them below or add one }
I have 63K file size for my blog… I think it is still acceptable.
Btw, blogger also avoid to put the pop-up ads on their blog, it is so irritating!
It is acceptable since your sites still loads fast for me. Yes, added to by list. Thanks for reminding. I forgot about it since there are so many bloggers who are aware of it, unless there are just spam blogs.
Wayne, a little correction here.
The size show in Google is just the size of your HTML text. It’s not the TOTAL file-size needed to load your page.
After the browser reads all the HTML, it will then call the required objects such as IMAGE. so your IMG SRC tags could only be less than 1k but the images you load is another thing altogether.
Did you know that this page alone loads about 400kb of information? Try it, just save the page to your desktop and see the total size.
Thanks for pointing out my mistake. The article has been modified. The size and the loading speed of a blog can now be checked with the tool provided.
Wah you grade me as loyal reader, so happy neh! Kakakaa, but as a loyal reader *ehem* I have to be honest. I like your content, they are very informative but sometimes they lack of some “entertainment” sparks. Adding them would make your content even more interesting.
And another thing that annoys me is the “read more” thing. I did blogged about it in one of my post The more I hate and you could read it there.
Hope all these doesn’t offend you. I’m just being a bit straight forward. =P Nonetheless, your blog is still one of my fav blogs, keep it up!
i tend to make my blog simple…
@ yung .
Entertainment. I will try to squeeze out the sense of humour as good as I can. You know, I don’t really how to crack jokes but I will try though.
I added the “Read More” because I don’t have many things to add into my sidebar and fingers will be tired if my readers need to scroll down and down just to read the posts. As I am posting daily, some readers might miss out post that I posted a day earlier and this is why I tried to shorten my posts.
Never mind, you can voice any suggestions, I need them to be better. Luckily I have someone like you to voice out. A big big thank you!
@ thiamhin
Being simple is great and I like simple blogs with great contents.
some good points highlighted up there.
That popularity contest plugin is very helpful actually… i found my site’s Japan related post getting more views than design related, izzit a sign that i shud write more Jap stuff than Design? i’m trying to balance those two.
So, my blog definitely will scare ppl away as there is too many banner
Everyday I come here to read and stay for more than 5 minutes!
Wayne Liew Dot Com is hosted on a US server and to make it loads faster (for Malaysian readers)
Something’s not right here. If you want it to load faster for Malaysian readers, it should be hosted locally (in Malaysia la).
Again, you have to understand how The Internet works. When you host it overseas, you’re request takes more hops to reach the server and the requested content will take more hops to come back. (Try doing a Traceroute)
Now, ping http://www.wayneliew.com (US) vs http://www.goldfries.com (MY)
Pinging goldfries.com [202.71.103.136] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 202.71.103.136: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=58
Pinging wayneliew.com [74.50.10.10] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 74.50.10.10: bytes=32 time=241ms TTL=49
Another problem with Hosting in the US is (if you and majority of your readers are Malaysian) is that IF there is a severed connection to the US – your readers will have problem loading the page while you have trouble updating.
A simple one is sweet. No ads is perfect, but who call me to make money with ads. Feel sorry for reader. HAHA
@ jayhan
If your popularity shows you that the post is the one getting all the attention, you should listen to it but still, you are open to many other choices like sticking more to Japan and design.
@ lukxiufung
I went to your blog and found that your ad placement are all right. Maybe the Nuffnang banner you can move down a bit, after making yourself your own banner.
@ Kitkat
Thanks for the support! I know you’re on of my best readers since I saw you commenting here!
@ goldfries
Serving my site from the US will make my site loads slow because of the added hops. This is why I am trying to lower the amount of data packets to be sent over the Internet.
I hope you don’t get my message.
Will this help? Can right? Anyway, can’t change now since I am already on a one year package.
@ Nicholas
Correct amountof ads is the key.
ok. my mistake. I missed out the second part of the sentence.
Well, just afraid that they wont gv me any ads if I put it else where but not top
I will remove it after I get the payment. Because I am thinking it is not worth to put such banner with only earning RM 1.75 per week with ads. Further, those week I got 5k visits. Last week, they announce to take care of blog with highly foreign visits (US), I got 90% from US. BUT, I got RM 6 only. Very diff with their 1st ads in my blog which is 6 times for this…..they make me look like they are giving good return first to attract you then let you there dying….no offend here
I agreed with sean, I found that the pop up ads so annoying !
I really have a big question about hosting location. As you guys know, PPP has segmentized the bloggers into different location. How they are going to determine the blogger’s location? By IP address or by blog’s hosted location?
Anyone can help on this?
Maybe I should make my blog load faster too…
@ goldfries
I won the battle, but you won the war.
@ lukxiufung
Yes, their whole week of ads is giving me lesser than the earnings of one day I earned with Advertlets.
@ keeyit
Help telling your friends if you see these ads lurking around their sites.
@ Sean
I am not sure on this. Do you remember they asked you to place a code inside your blog before you can use them? Maybe that will be the tracking code to see where most of your visitors are from. I know what you are thinking, “My blog can’t have lots of US visitors?”
Well, I think they have their way, searching out all the Malaysia posts you have is a way. This is why there are investigation going on. Also, everyone can report your blog to PPP.
@ MonkeyWong
Your blog loads fast for me.
My blog…seems like very slow..~
What web host do you use? Mind to share? It loads slower than average but it’s still OK for me. You can still see me lurking around there though.
This is a great article. Thankyou.
Some o fthe stuff may seem obvious, but sometimes it can be overlooked and need pointing out. I’m sure many will find this very useful
Good points – I’m glad to learn that I’m doing most of them. It’s not something that I’ve focussed on before but I will give it some thought now that you’ve bought it to my consciousness.
@ Noddegamra
Thanks. I am just trying to pick up those that have been forgotten.
@ pondlife
Cool, I hoped you learnt something here.
i hate autoplay media, always bring alot of ugly sound, make me feel unconfortable
Some play songs. Is it ugly as well?
I just find it too irritating though…