Written on June 20th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 01:06 am by Darren Rowse
How to Increase a Blog’s Page Views
There is often a lot of talk in ‘how to blog’ type articles on increasing visitors numbers to a blog there is another statistic that is important to some bloggers also - page views.
Most statistics packages measure both for you - ‘visitors’ (or unique visitors) measures the number of people, but ‘page views’ measures the number of pages on your blog that those visitors look at.
The number of page views per visitor varies quite significantly from blog to blog (based on many factors) but there are a number of reasons why bloggers might wish to increase this statistic including:
- Stickiness - the more pages a reader views the increased chance of them coming back are.
- Revenue - more and more of the ads that we are running on your blogs are impression based ads (ie the more times the ads are seen the more that is earned).
Whether you want to increase page views or not is something that different bloggers will place as a different priority, depending upon the goals of their blog, but if it is something you’d like to work on here are 14 tips on how to increase page views:
1. Interlink your Posts
Perhaps one of the simplest ways to increase the page views on your blog is to send yourself traffic by links between posts from within posts. While for some of us it might feel a little funny promoting your own writing in this way I find that my readers appreciate it if it’s done in a way that adds value to their experience of your blog by linking to other relevant things that you’ve written on the topics that you’re writing about. Most bloggers touch on the same topics numerous times in the life of a blog and to link to previous times you’ve mentioned something adds depth to what you write.
2. Highlight Related Posts
One way to interlink your posts that doesn’t happen from within a post is to have a ‘related posts’ section at the end of your entries. You’ll see an example of this if you scroll down this page to the yellow section just above my comments section. On enternetusers this is run by a WordPress plugin (called related posts) which automatically finds other posts I’ve written on similar topics (if it’s doing it’s job you’ll find that I’ve written on this very same topic before - hopefully my ideas have developed a little). Of course you can also manually run a ‘related posts’ section also by simply ending your article with other relevant things you’ve written that readers might like to check out.
3. Add a Newsletter or Post Notification Services
One thing that I’ve noticed on some of my blogs is the power of having an email newsletter to increase page views. Those of you that have signed up to my newsletter here at enternetusers will know that I generally have a section called ‘hot posts’ in which I recap the 5 most popular posts of the week on this blog. While regular readers of the blog who will have seen those posts already probably don’t visit those links quite a few people do. In doing so they often seem to visit more than one of them, thus increasing not only ‘visitor’ numbers but ‘page view’ numbers also. Other services automatically notify readers via email of new posts to your blog which you might also find useful (for example Zookoda and Feedburner both have ways of doing this).
4. Highlight Key Posts in Prominent Positions
I watched a friend surf through enternetusers recently on their first visit to the blog. One of the things I noticed that they did was surf through the posts that I have highlighted in my three menu boxes at the top of this site. I’ve written previously about why I have those boxes up there and how they are key posts from enternetusers that help with creating stickiness on the blog. My friend surfed through all of the links in the top left menu and some of those in the other boxes also - racking up page views along the way.
5. ‘Best of’ Pages
The other thing about the posts that my friend viewed from my top menus is that many of them are what I call ‘best of’ or ‘compilation’ pages that link to multiple other pages on this blog. For example the ‘Top 20 Posts at enternetusers‘ is a prime example and is a post that I know that many first time readers of enternetusers surf through from start to finish (I can tell because I can see them leaving comments along the way).
6. Write a Series of Posts
Writing a series of posts on a blog is an effective way of building page views on two fronts. For starters as you write the series you will find it draws people back to your blog over a number of days because they want to find out what you’ve got to say next. Secondly it’s also great once you’ve finished the series because if you’re smart about interlinking them you’ll find that people will read your series (with each post on a different page) from start to finish. Probably the best example that I can give you of this is my Blogging for Beginners series which I highlight in the prominent position on this blog and which I know new readers surf through from start to finish (and in doing so they end up reading 30-40 posts).
7. Use Extended Entires on your Front Page
If you’re writing long posts use the ‘more’ (or extended entry) feature to link people into your individual pages. I wouldn’t do it on all posts as it can be annoying, but for long posts it helps keep your main page more manageable but also has the side benefit of increases page views. I think some bloggers use this feature too much - but in moderation in longer posts it can be useful.
8. Run a Blog Project or Meme
One of the side benefits of my recent group writing projects (like the recent ‘goals‘ one) is that I found they not only brought new links and readers to enternetusers but they also drew people back multiple times in a week (and day) to see what updates there had been to it. While memes, contests or projects like these won’t appeal to all of your readers you’ll find that some really really get off on them and will keep coming back to participate. Again - it’s not my primary goal for doing them but is a nice side benefit.
9. Excerpts in RSS feeds
Longer term enternetusers readers will be aware that I switched from partial to full feeds in my RSS feeds a month or two back. While I did this for a number of reasons I knew in doing so that I would probably see a drop in actual visitor numbers and page views to the blog. This has been the case (although keep in my that RSS readership has increased significantly). Obviously if you do not give RSS readers your full posts in feeds you force them to either only read the first part of your articles or to actually come and visit your blog. This is obviously something I’ve had a change of heart on but is something worth knowing if you’re considering moving to full feeds.
10. Entice RSS Readers to Visit
Don’t tease or suck your RSS subscribers into visiting your blog but be smart about using techniques that might get them to visit. Using Polls, writing posts in a way that invites comments, interlinking posts etc will all draw your RSS readers (who don’t create any page views) to come and visit your actual blog (I wrote a little more on this here).
11. Build Interactivity into your Blog
The more your readers participate in your blog the more they’ll come back to it and they more pages they’ll view when they do. For starters people will come back to a blog if they’ve left their mark on it (via a comment, a vote in a poll etc) to see how others interact there but secondly the act of interacting often means a second page view. For example the very act of leaving a comment means two pages are viewed (once in viewing the post and a second time once the comment has been made). Of course this is not the primary reason you want people to comment but it’s a byproduct of it. Interactivity on blogs generally happens around the comments section (find out how to get more comments here) but is also increasingly common around polls and other blog tools.
12. Draw People Back to Comments
To build on this idea of interactivity, especially around comments, a couple of techniques that people use effectively is to highlight recent comments (there are a variety of plugins that will help you do this in a section on your sidebar - here’s one such plugin) but also to give people the opportunity to follow your comments either by having a RSS feed for comments on your blog or by allowing them to subscribe to comments via email (here’s a WP comment that does this).
13. Add a Search Feature
Allowing your readers to look for previous topics that you’ve written about by adding a search feature to your blog can also add further page views. There are a number of these available - most blog platforms have them built in and AdSense also offers one that lets your readers search either your site or the web as a whole (and where you can make a little money on the side if they search and then click on an ad - see the search bar in my sidebar for an example of the AdSense one).
14. Give Your Readers a Homework Assignment
Over the last week or so I’ve started giving readers on my digital photography school blog homework assignments. Because the blog is a ‘tips’ one it is a natural progression for me to suggest something that they could go away and do having learnt the tip. I find that in doing so readers keep coming back to a page for a number of reasons. Firtly they come back to refer to the tip you’ve written - especially if it is a step by step tip that they’ll use over and over a again. Secondly they come back to the page to tell you about or show you their assignment (if you allow them to submit their work). At present I get users to submit their homework to a Flickr group I’ve set up for that blog so in effect I’m not really increasing my own blog’s page views - but it does add to the page views of that Flickr group which has become quite Active in just a week.
Homework Assignment
You didn’t think I’d end this post without carrying out my own advice did you?
- Which of the above techniques do you implement on your blog already?
- Which will you go away an implement today?
- Go and give one (or more than one) a go and let us know how it goes in the days ahead.
Written on June 20th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 12:06 am by Darren Rowse
b5media launches 4 ‘CoBranded’ Blogs
I don’t generally post every announcement that we make over at b5media but this is one that I think fits with the enternetusers focus of bloggers finding new ways to build commercial blogs.
Today we’re announcing four new cobranded blogs with VIP Fan Clubs - the official fan club and merchandise sales partner for Fox Broadcasting.
The four blogs are:
The interactions between b5media and VIP will be two way as one promotes the other in terms of traffic and will involve the sharing of stories and revenue streams.
Read the full story at the b5media blog.
Written on June 19th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 11:06 pm by Darren Rowse
AdSense Sends Some Publishers Surveys
Threads on Digital Point and Webmaster World are reporting that AdSense has sent out a survey to some publishers in the last few hours. Participants are entered in a competition to win them a possible $1000 ‘gift card’.
Did anyone get a survey to fill in?
Written on June 19th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 12:06 pm by Darren Rowse
Experimenting with Flickr Groups
Just a quick update on the latest experiment that I’ve been doing at my Digital Photography School blog.
A couple of weeks ago I had a few emails from readers who started to make suggestions about how they’d like to share their photos, work on group projects and meet other readers.
I considered adding comments to the blog but then began to wonder if there might be another option. As a result I started a Flickr group for the blog - you can see it here.
The main aims of the group where:
- A place to share photos that readers are taking
- A place where I can set ‘assignments’ that relate to the tips I’m writing about on the blog
- A place where readers can discuss what they are learning and ask questions about their cameras/photography
I considered starting my own forum for it but decided to go with a Flickr group in the mean time for a number of reasons:
- I’m pushed for time at the moment and will be for the next month or so and thought this was a quicker/more immediate solution.
- Many of my readers already hang out in Flickr and I suspected that the pick up rate would be much higher this way than trying to convert them to a forum that they were unfamiliar with.
- Flickr is an amazing place which is filled with many many thousands of digital camera users. It makes sense to become a part of that community because they are the type of people I am writing DPS for. I’m interested to see what flow on impact getting involved in that community will have.
- Hosting pictures can be expensive and I’d rather let Flickr pay for it.
On the downside:
- It means sending people away from my site
- It’s not a very customizable setting for either photo sharing or discussion
- I can’t monetize it (it’s against Flickr’s rules to set up commercial Flickr groups that directly monetize the group)
Ultimately I think I’ll move towards a forum and try to get users to host their pictures on Flickr (or another photo sharing site) but in the mean time it’s an experiment that is working very well.
The Flickr group has 289 members who have shared 187 photos so far and who are really getting involved in the discussion and assignments. I’m particularly amazed by the numbers of people who are doing the assignments I’ve set. This takes blogging into a new and more interActive direction than I’ve gone before and I’m really enjoying the interactions.
The other benefit of the group is that it’s actually driving traffic to the blog. I mentioned above that one downside is that having it off the blog’s domain means I send people away - but I’ve also noticed that some of the new readers for the blog are finding it through the group itself as new users talk it up in other Flickr groups.
Written on June 18th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 06:06 pm by Darren Rowse
enternetusers ‘Issues’
Apologies to readers for the outage of enternetusers today.
I’m not really able to say what the problem was but hopefully we’re back up and running and won’t have another long outage like we had today.
After a long frustrating day I think I might go watch Australia take on Brazil in the World Cup - wish us luck (we’ll need it)!
Written on June 18th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 12:06 am by Darren Rowse
Email Newsletters are More Emotionally Engaging than Websites: Study
While we’re talking about email newsletters - Nielsen Normal Group have done some interesting research (found via an email from Ken - again) that finds that readers of email newsletters have ‘highly emotional reactions to them’ in contrast to the reactions that readers of websites have (where they are more more ‘oriented toward functionality’ and ‘want to get in and get out as quickly as possible rather than “connect” with the site’.
The results are quite long but here are a few snippets (quotes with a few of my own comments).
On the overall findings:
‘Users tend to glance at websites when they need to accomplish something or to find the answer to a specific question. In contrast, newsletters feel personal because they arrive in users’ inboxes, and users have an ongoing relationship with them. Newsletters also have a social aspect, as users often forward them to colleagues and friends.
The positive aspect of this emotional relationship is that newsletters can create much more of a bond between users and a company than a website can. The negative aspect is that newsletter usability problems have a much stronger impact on the customer relationship than website usability problems….’
I’d be interested to see a similar study on different type of websites (especially blogs). I think many blogs would have a more relational feeling for readers than more static types of websites.
On How to do Email Newsletters:
The most frequent complaint in our study was about newsletters that arrived too often. And, when we let them vent, the most frequent advice our study participants had for newsletter creators was to “keep it brief.”
Newsletters must be designed to facilitate scanning. In our first study, 23% of the newsletters were read thoroughly. In our third study, four years later, only 19% of the newsletters were read thoroughly. The drop in percentage of thoroughly read newsletters is a good indication of the increased volume of email that users have to process.
It’s actually quite similar to how research find people read websites/blog.
On News Feeds (RSS):
The first, and strongest, guideline about news feeds is to stop calling them RSS. In our most recent study, 82% of users had no idea what this term referred to.
News feeds are definitely not for everybody, and they’re not a replacement for email newsletters. Feeds can supplement newsletters for sites that cater to users who prefer a centralized view of headlines.
Feeds are a cold medium in comparison with email newsletters. Feeds don’t form the same relationship between company and customers that a good newsletter can build.
I’d never considered the advice on not calling feeds RSS but calling them ‘news feeds’. It actually makes good sense and is something I might take a little more notice of, especially on my blogs which are not on bloggy topics where I find most of my readers don’t follow the blog via RSS News Feeds.
It makes sense to me that feeds would be seen as a colder medium - especially because they don’t have comments sections built in and are read out of the context of the rest of the blog, especially it’s design which plays a part in setting the scene for content.
Written on June 17th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 01:06 pm by Darren Rowse
Email Newsletters - How Many Get Emails Through?
iZachy has a very interesting post comparing email newsletter services called - Are Your Subscribers Getting Your Newsletters?. In it Ken (a different Ken to the last post) compares services from FeedBlitcz, Squeet, FeedBurner and Zookoda.
I’m not completely sure on the accuracy of it all for all readers and situations but it looks like Ken’s put in some good work and the stats do highlight a problem that face all email newsletter services.
I know that my last service bounced close to 40% of the emails that I sent but that having switched to Zookoda that this number is now over half of this (but perhaps it could still be better if this study is accurate).
Written on June 17th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 11:06 am by Darren Rowse
ebay AdContext Product Manager Sheds Light on Program
One of the product managers from ebay’s new AdContext contextual ad program, Ken, has just left a comment on my previous post about AdContext. As the comment was pretty long and quite comprehensive I thought I’d promote it to be a post of it’s own. Hopefully it sheds some light on AdContext for those of you considering joining the program. Keep in mind the information is from someone working on it so there is an element of natural bias there - but I think Ken’s done a reasonably good job. Thanks for stopping by mate. Here’s his comment:
I’m one of the product managers for eBay AdContext. I just read Darren’s post and everyone’s comments and I wanted to give everyone some information so you can decide if AdContext is worth your time (or not :). I’ll try to keep it factual so you won’t think I’m trying to pull some marketing spin here.
Payout structure: The payout structure for eBay AdContext is based on eBay’s affiliate program. In the US this based on a revenue share for bids, BINs as well as each new confirmed registered user (CRU) you send to eBay. Details are here. For other countries where eBay operates the compensation structure is not revenue share but pays out on each bid, BIN and CRU (for example, see the UK payout structure here).
Revenue share percentage: Note that the minimum tier pays 40% of the revenue and the maximum tier is 70% (not the 30% and 60% that Darren had in his original post).
Buy It Now (BIN): Publishers will have the ability to have ad units show only BIN listings in the ad unit if they so choose. This should address the concern that was raised that people raised about not allowing BIN listings to be part of AdContext. Also, as Arnie pointed out in his comment, you can show auctions that are close to their ending time so the odds of winning quickly are higher.
Winning Bids/BINs: Note that the publisher can actually generate revenue from multiple winning bids/BINs (not just one). The publisher “owns” the referral for up to 7 days and any winning bids/BINs generated in this time period contribute to the revenue shared with the publisher. For instance, a person reading a cell phone review can click on an ad unit for a cell phone and purchases it via Buy-It-Now and then may decide to place a bid on a bluetooth headset and win that auction 4 days later. Both the revenue on BIN cell phone and the auction bluetooth headset are part of the revenue share to that publisher. Note that since tracking is done on a “last publisher to refer the user wins” basis by CJ.
Category Hints: When creating their ad unit publishers have the ability to provide category hints to the system. These category hints map 1-to-1 to the eBay category structure and will optimize the keywords and the listings that are displayed in the ad unit. For instance, if you know that your site is oriented towards sports memorabilia instead of sporting goods, you can provide a category hint that will allow AdContext to focus on just sports memorabilia. This addresses David Bain’s comment about Chitika’s eMiniMalls ad categories.
Ad Unit Look and Feel: The ad units are highly customizable by the publisher to fit in with their website’s design. Your ad unit look and feel only takes 2 things from the auction listing: the text of the listing title and the listing picture. The colors, fonts, spacing that are selected by a seller on eBay for their listing do not override your ad unit look and feel. This addresses part of Tom’s comment on how AdContext ad units would be not as blog-friendly.
Listing Titles: Tom also mentioned in his comment that listings have “Crap headlines followed by crap sub-heads!”. I’ll admit that listings titles (aka headlines) are totally controlled by the seller (after all they do apy for them) and some of them are not what you would call professional. But I will say that I believe the vast majority of listing titles are straight to the point and relevant. Note that economic Darwinism will be at play here. If a seller consistently uses odd listing titles and they negatively impact the seller’s business then it will be less likely you will see these odd listing titles. However, if the odd listing titles actually don’t harm or even improve the probability of a person clicking through on a listing, then do you really care if the listing titles are odd? Another thing I should mention is that the contextual matching system is not entirely dependent on the listing title to perform the keyword matching.
Contextual vs. Non-contextual: AdContext will actually let you create ad units that display listings that match keywords the publisher chooses. A non-contextual ad unit (sort of an oxymoron) is the result. Tom mentioned at the end of his comment how this is a good way of getting the “right ads without it being a ‘contextual’ system”.
OK, that’s it for the facts. I just wanted to give some general comments too:
I can’t comment on other company’s advertising system’s terms of service (TOS) but I hope you find AdContext’s TOS flexible. I know that at the end of the day publisher’s have to make an economic decision and pick the solution that monetizes the most efficiently for them.
Darren correctly points out that the 40-70% the publisher receives is not from the winning bid/BIN price but is from the revenue that eBay would take from the transaction. While his percentages seem small (the correct values are 2.6% to 4.55% using his 6.5% take-rate figure) a lot of eBay’s affiliates drive significant monthly revenues using this exact same payout structure. I’m not at liberty to disclose what they are though. But unlike other company’s we tell you up front what percentage of the revenue we are sharing with affiliates.
There are several comments about the effectiveness of the system and the number of clicks it would take to deliver a revenue generating event. At the end of the day I would say publishers are most concerned about how effectively they monetize their inventory of page impressions. It all depends on the average selling price (ASP) of the eBay listings that you send your site visitors to. AdContext could be equally lucrative for publishers in high-volume/low-ASP and low-volume/high-ASP models and in-between as well. Publishers whose content matches well with eBay listings are likely to be the ones who moentize the best.
I would also like to mention that as part of the eBay Developer’s Program we announced a new API call: getContextualKeywords. This allows developers to access the backend technology that powers AdContext and to develop their own applications that leveral our contextual analysis system. Whether your goal is to build another advertising solution or something unique our system will analyze URLs that you provide it and suggest contextually relevant keywords in a rank ordered list.
Thanks for reading, hopefully I’ve provided you the information you need to decide to try eBay AdContext (http://affiliates.ebay.com/ads/adcontext/).
Written on June 17th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 10:06 am by Darren Rowse
Cold Call Blogging and Effective Selling on Blogs
It always amazes me how badly some businesses interact with potential clients.
Yesterday I had the ‘pleasure’ of receiving three calls in 10 minutes from a tele-sales company where the callers (3 different ones) started their calls (where they were trying to sell me a mobile phone) with these three lines:
1. ‘Hi, who am I speaking to?’
2. ‘Hi, Do you have a mobile phone?’
3. ‘Hi, Can I ask how much you earn?’
Yes - these were their very first words on each of the calls!
I was stunned to say the least - cold callers, ringing with the intention of selling me their product with an approach like that.
Now I do sympathize with the task that the people making the calls had - they are probably working for minimum wages in some other country and have been given the impossible task of selling phones to people on the other side of the world over the phone - but the approach that they had been trained to use didn’t go down to well with me. To say that I became more irate with each call would be an understatement!
As I’ve reflected upon the calls (and calmed down a little) they have left me thinking about the challenge that bloggers, especially those selling things (selling their own products, selling their business, selling affiliate products), have with their readers.
As I reflect on some of the sales and business blogs that I’ve seen over the last few months I have come to the conclusion that many are using a similar technique to my callers yesterday. Ok - perhaps they are not being quite as intrusive (or downright rude) but a lot of the blogging sales technique seems to take a ‘cold call’ type approach - and a lot of them do it badly.
Of course the challenge online is that sometimes you do need to take a cold call approach to your sales, people surf to your site for just a few seconds and so you have a limited opening to get your message across - but for me blogging is not that type of medium, at least it’s not at it’s best in cold call mode.
Blogging is at it’s most effective and powerful when it engages people, when it relates to them, when it provides something useful and when it creates a conversation.
I’ve experimented with ’selling’ on my blogs via affiliate programs and in ’selling myself’ as a consultant and I’ve found that it’s much more effective to do so out of some level of relationship with a reader - something that usually takes time. As a result bloggers (whether they are selling things or not) need to learn skills like converting one off readers to regular readers in order to build relationships with readers over time. It’s out of this relationship and trust that real influence happens.
PS: read more on techniques for using affiliate programs to make money blogging here.
Written on June 17th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 12:06 am by Darren Rowse
YPN launches Publisher Services and New Help Center
YPN have just released a new section for their publishers called ‘publisher services’. (hat tip to Scott for the email headsup).
I’ve included a screen shot of it below but it’s basically a collection of tutorials and tools to help publishers improve three aspects of their site development. Here’s how they define the three areas:
- Drive Traffic - A number of ways to get more visitors
- Enhance your Site - Quality Yahoo! tools and features from Yahoo! that differentiate your site
- Build your Site - Solutions for creating and hosting your site
Each section has it’s own page of developing these areas (screen caps of each below - click to enlarge).
I’m yet to go through each page that they provide in great detail but a lot of it seems to be promoting other Yahoo! services that they offer (cross promotion) - some of it looks useful enough though.
New Help Center
YPN have also announced a newly revamped Help Center for their publishers. This includes:
- A How-To Guide - Detailed instructions on how to use each area of the Yahoo! Publisher Network account management system
- Account FAQs - A comprehensive set of FAQs that addresses most publisher questions
- Account Overview Demo - A step-by-step guide that takes you through the most prominent features of the Yahoo! Publisher Network account management system
- Implementation Guide - Detailed assistance to help publishers set up and manage their Yahoo! Publisher Network account
Here’s some screen caps of the publishers services pages:
Here’s the Drive Traffic Section
Here’s the Enhance your Site Section
Here’s the Build your Site Section
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enternetusers Sponsors
Team Blogs
Blogs from b5media management and staff members.-
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And we just found out about get paid to. When your phone rings or you receive an email or receive a text message then you get paid. Could it be that my groom’s fantasies might actually be wilder than the site of me perfectly coiffed, bustled, and veiled?
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