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Increase Your Blog’s Stickiness

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“Stickiness” on a blog (or website) is getting visitors to stay longer, read more, subscribe and leave comments. Now, isn’t that something we all want?

So today, three tips that I’ve heard only about a billion times to help increase your blog’s stickiness:

  1. Link to related posts. I know with WordPress there’s a way to do this automatically (with a plugin), but even if you have to do it manually, it’s worth it. Before posting, brainstorm posts on similar topics. You can also look through labels or categories in your archives to see if there’s something related. At the end of your post, list a few (three is a good number) of these related posts. If someone has read that far, chances are they’ll want to read more stuff just like it!
  2. Make it easy to find similar posts. As with above, if someone is reading your site, chances are they’re interested in what you’re saying. Use some sort of categorization and/or tagging system (categories, tags, labels, etc.) to help them find similar posts on your blog. If applicable, list your categories/tags/labels in the sidebar to help people explore your blog.
  3. Tell visitors what to do. You want your visitors to subscribe to your blog or comment? Tell them! At the end of every entry, invite readers to subscribe to your feed (code the invitation into your template!). Ask for comments; put a subscribe button in a prominent place on your blog. If someone arrives at your site and doesn’t know what to do next, they’ll probably leave instead of hunting for something to do on your site.

Would you like to know more about developing your blog’s stickiness? I’ve written a free guide to increasing your blog’s stickiness, “Get Your Visitors to Stick!”

Also be sure to submit your entries for our Group Writing Project this week!

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32 replies on “Increase Your Blog’s Stickiness”

Great tips, thanks so much. 🙂 I actually got an email this morning from a mom wanting to know how to get her blog more noticable in the mommy blogosphere. I’m sending her this way. 🙂

I put the plugin for related posts on my site and couldn’t get it to work 🙁 I have only done the related posting once, but now will think of doing it more! You are right I bet that does help. Thanks Jordan!
-mommyzabs.

ps- i notice that when i ask for participation via comments I get much higher comment reads! It really does work. Maybe it is the push people need to come out 🙂
-mommyzabs

@Summer—definitely keep an eye on this spot! I’ve got some great things planned here!

@Elizabeth—Hm… I couldn’t imagine what the problem is. I can imagine it now. Which plugin was it (what site was it from)?

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This is a great tip. I have noticed that WFMW posts bring in tons of traffic (mostly first time visitors), but that few of them stick around to see what else I have written. I will try this out next week.

Good list, thanks. I haven´t had any success with the plug ins for related comments either, but I think I will start adding them manually now that I have a good list of posts.

@At Home Mom: Try going in to your Plugins menu, then click on Related Posts Options. At the bottom of the page, there’s a little blurb about a script you have to run. It worked for me, but I know it doesn’t work for everyone. Worth a shot, though, right?

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I tried to add tag warrior but I could not get it to work. It duplicated tags and the tags went to pages that did not exist. I’m sure I am not doing something correctly, but I have no idea how to fix it.

Is there another plugin for related posts?

My biggest problem is that Google has indexed my site by category rather than by post. So when someone searches for something specific, they have to scan through a page or more of different posts to find it. Often I have exactly what they are looking for, but I don’t know if they ever find it.

Kymberlyn—Ultimate Tag Warrior has a conflict with another part of WordPress now. You can edit your UTW file (if you’re adventurous!), or use another tagging plugin.

MommyZabs has told me about the If You Liked That plugin which works for her instead of Related Posts.

You can edit your robots.txt file (found in your root directory) to say:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /category

That prevents Google from indexing your category pages (although for some reason Googlebot disobeyed mine until I changed the user-agent to Googlebot).

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