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. 
