Real Words

This is a guest post by Krisca Te. Details about Krisca Te at the end of the article.

Blogging is one of the hottest and most profitable online enterprises you can do on your own. You can start working and earning money right away without being caught up in the usual problems of running a business solo. Very little capital and equipment are necessary for you to become a reputable blogger.

A web master’s dilemma

If you want to start your own money-making blog, you have to pick a topic or niche that you feel confident about and interested in. Running a blog means constantly producing fresh, useful, relevant and updated content about the things that interest your reader. You have to know what to write about before you even set up the site’s domain.

Once you know what your blog will be about, you have to tweak the content so it will rank well on search engine listings. No one will find your site unless they know the URL, so you have to make sure that your content is search engine optimized for better site traffic.

But your job as a webmaster doesn’t begin and end with generating search engine friendly articles. After all, you are writing for a human audience, not an algorithm. Search engines can only do so much to promote your website, and at the end of the day you have to put in extra effort to attract human readers and make them stay with you, post after post.

Looking for something else?

Being a blogger means balancing your content so that it is both search engine and user friendly. Search engines like Google will stop recommending your blog if readers don’t appreciate the content that you have on your site, and that will spell the end of your site traffic heydays.

Moreover, you should also be able to convince your reader that you have other interesting and useful stuff elsewhere on your site. When a user clicks through to your blog from Google or Bing and views one page, that’s one cookie point for your site traffic. However, that same reader may also bounce off your blog to another site if he doesn’t like what he sees on your post. He clicks through to the other websites that turned up in his search listing instead.

Leaving your site after viewing just one page thus gives you a high bounce rate, which can be an important indicator that there is something lacking in your content. In a nutshell, a blog’s bounce rate is equivalent to the number of one-page-view visits over the total number of visits. High site traffic doesn’t necessarily mean that you blog is doing well overall-if you also have high bounce rate, that means that your readers don’t find your blog useful enough for their purposes.

Reduce your bounce rate today

You can’t control how your readers behave once they are in your website, but you can tweak your content so that they will want to spend more time viewing your other pages or even signing up for your RSS feeds or email newsletter. In short, you have to convince them to stick around for more of what you have to offer, be it more information or products or services.

The secret is in spicing up your content so that each and every article is informative, relevant, accurate and helpful. Apart from this, there are also a couple of other ways you can try to make sure that every visit to your website decreases the overall bounce rate and ensures that you get maximum exposure and readership for all your posts:

1.     Create internal links. Ensuring that all your pages are sufficiently and properly interlinked can play a big role in how readers use your website. Include a list of relevant posts to every page so that they can explore other pages and topics further.

2.     Have a clear and easy-to-use navigation scheme. An intuitive navigation allows your users to feel like they are following a well-organized train of thought. Make sure that all your buttons and tabs are working fine so that readers won’t be frustrated by not being able to view pages they’ve previously loaded.

3.    Provide ample content on every page. Two sentences for every page is not enough to convince your reader that you actually have more to say about anything. On the flip side, large amounts of text on every page don’t automatically mean that you are an expert. Try having 300-500 words on every page so that your reader will not be discouraged by the length (or lack thereof) of the content.

4.    Update your blog regularly. Readers don’t want to read stale, outdated content. They want fresh information and timely news. Get them to stay with you longer by offering new content on a regular basis, but don’t forget to link back to previous posts that may be relevant to the topic.

When not out building relationships with other bloggers, Krisca Te can be found reading blogs that tackle personal development. She is also a personal finance freak who is currently working with ACC, a personal finance blog. You can follow ACC on Twitter if you like to stay updated on their latest contents.