Your Blog Traffic Is Low Because You’re Using The Wrong Hotspots
Also, take my RSS & Email subscription links, which are at the top of the page like they are for many blogs. Why on earth do we force readers who might have liked what they have just read and are good candidates for ‘impulse purchases’ like adding a RSS feed, to go back up to the top of the page to subscribe? Why would they even think to go back up to the top of the page to do so? As bloggers we’ve got to think more like retailers and use better merchandising of our ‘high margin’ products like RSS.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom and I do think I’ve got a few things right:
- My main banner that is embedded in my posts is in the best place, and I’ve worked hard to make sure that there is no ‘noise’ around it like time stamps, other links, tags, comment counts, fancy graphics etc that offer no value to visitors who just want to read the post. All this items do in my view is reduce my CTR
- When I write longer posts like this one, if I remember I paginate them so that users are drawn back to my hotspots providing me with additional chances to ’sell’ them something
- My 2nd banner below my content and my Related Posts section are almost in the right place. Ideally I’d like them to be closer to the content. I need to work out how to tweak my theme so that they appear above the ‘Share This’ link and the post tags, both of which are automatically inserted by plugins so this might be hard
- My ‘Most Read Posts’ are again almost in the right place. I think I need to check how long my posts are on average to see whether I need to move this section slightly up or down
- I paginate my comments to ensure that anyone reading the comments isn’t forced to read a page that scrolls away sometimes farther than the eye can see on some blogs. This way I can constantly artificially draw readers back to my hotspots. It also helps to increase my page impressions for CPM advertisements
- I’ve tucked the stuff that is only of value to my fellow bloggers, whose usage of my site isn’t going to be as heavily influenced by my design like the MyBlogLog images, Blogroll etc, away at the bottom of my page
Over the next week or so I’m going to be experimenting with the location of items in my sidebar, and also trying to tidy up the section in or near my new hotspots. Please let me know if you’ve got any pointers or advice you think I’ll find, or other readers will find, useful.
Or, just let me know if you’ve found this post useful and whether it will influence your future blog designs.
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Thanks for the tip of the search engine. Will be implementing this myself.
Are you using Adsense for Search? If so you can integrate the search results page completely in your site, as I have done with AjayDSouza.com
Yep I’m using Adsense for search and it’s integrated.
You’ll have to show me how you got the tickbox to default to internal search rather than google. Or you could do it for me
I don’t want to go as far as you though and remove the google option next to the search box, I still want to show both options up-front
[...] Blair tiene unas interesantes observaciones sobre cuales posiciones son las óptimas para poner publicidad en un blog. Lo que comenta es que hay una diferencia entre un sitio web común (como un portal o una tienda) y [...]
This is genius, thank you. There are a lot of things here I hadn’t considered, especially the points you made about the hot spot directly after and to the side of your posts. I will tweak my design accordingly, I think you are completely right.