It’s a proven fact that has been researched over and over… How long do people spend on your site when they visit? The answer: Less than 15 seconds - on average. I can most assuredly attest to that. I have been pouring over my Google Analytics stats, trying to figure out what it is that my visitors are reading. I even ask you guys in another post: What do you want to see on this blog? What’s even worse is that typical visitors only ever visit one page of the site! How do we as bloggers change this?

photo credit: mil8

It’s these crappy metrics that have made me look at what it is that you, the reader, want from a blog. I’m going to share some of my findings and work on implementing them here in the near future — I’m getting married in a week… I’ll just have to get it done after the wedding.

How much is a click worth?

Most people take it for granted… What’s a click of the mouse really worth — It’s actually pretty impressive when a reader clicks a link on your site. A mere movement of the finger on the mouse button speaks volumes - about the quality of your content, about the reader and about your design.

• First, you’ve written something that has drawn the readers in, you’re in essense enticing your readers to commit to clicking through to something that you have recommended.
• Second, you’ve managed to capture your readers’ attention. 99% of the time, clicking on a link - either internal or external - is very intentional. If a reader is not captured by your content, they simply will not click on any of the links on your site.
• Third, your design is structured well enough, not only to draw attention to your content, but also to instill a certain level of trust from the reader.

If you cannot generate clicks on your content, you will never get your readers past that first entry page. They will simply use the back button of the browser to return to whence they came. This site currently has an average pageview of 2.08 views per visit. This is not great. There are a lot more pages to this blog than 2.08!!

This has led me to believe that something was keeping me from taking this blog to the next level, so I’ve decided to do something about it. I’m also willing to take any advice from you the reader on what it is that you would like to see on the site - both content and design.

Now.. if you’re actually reading this article at this point, then you’ve probably clicked through from the home page or another related post. In the process, you’ve made me superbly happy by showing me your dedication, and you’ve also probably noticed that I do not show the full article content on the front page. This is by design, as I want you to get into the habit of clicking through for the rest of the content (and hopefully commenting while you’re at it).

I’ve been told that this “teaser strategy” works wonders. Along with the site design, the teaser strategy is said to increase pageviews upwards of 500%. Some stats that I have read, I unfortunately cannot remember where exactly I read this, showed an increase from 1.4 pageviews to 5.2 pageviews per visitor in just over 3 weeks.

Still not impressed? Here’s another way to look at it: each page view is another ad impression… On an extremely popular site, like this one that could make a huge difference in ad revenue.

So, to recap — How much is a click worth anyway?

In my opinion… It’s worth a lot! A click is a vote of confidence in your site and content, and I’ll take all the confidence that I can get.

The bottom line

photo credit: Britt Selvitelle

If you’ve got full-body posts on your front page of your blog, change it up, implement some teasers on your front page. You can let me know what kind of impact it has on your pageviews. Also, I think this approach will force you to write more creative and capturing opening paragraphs for your posts — Another bonus.

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