We all want to get a lot of traffic going to our blogs. It’s common sense right? Good traffic brings more readers/subscribers, which brings in more money. The problem with it is that most of us don’t work hard enough in converting that traffic into a repeat traffic. In other terms, turning new visitors into loyal readers.

In my not so recent post, I claimed that most bloggers fail doing this thing called “marketing.” What I see is that most bloggers just try to get as much traffic as possible without really considering the quality. Sometimes they even prefer the quantity, surprisingly.

The Relationship Between Pageviews and Good Marketing is Not Linear

Bloggers completely have this misconception that amount of traffic they drive to their blog is directly proportional to whether they’re marketing well or not. It’s definitely not true. I mean I can get 1,000 unique hits per day purchasing PTC traffic but does that mean it’s a good marketing tactic? No.

The determining factor for the success of it is the conversion rate, and that depends on your goals (which you do have, right?).

Has the guest post I wrote on somebody else’s blog brought in more subscribers to MY blog? Will that exposure I get on a blogging discussion forum stick around for a few days? Maybe a few weeks? Questions can be endless but it all starts with setting your conversion goal. May it be signing up to your newsletter, leaving a comment or anything else.

The one aspect that separates good bloggers from bloggers who hardly get any traffic is the ability to market and promote competently. And alongside competent marketing is testing and tweaking. A good example is writing guest posts. Most bloggers just stop there. What do you do after that? That’s a question many cannot answer well.

Did it convert? Did I see an increase in subscribers? Did they sign up for my newsletter? Distinguishing what works from what doesn’t is a key factor in determining whether something is worth doing or not.

Repeat Traffic: The Only Traffic that Makes Sense

I’m sure I will get some flak for saying this but all traffic outside repeat traffic doesn’t really count. What’s the goal of having people visit your site if they’re not gonna be back again?

When it comes to sales, it’s like figuring out what the point of giving out freebies if not everyone who accepted your offer will come back. In every aspect of blogging and business, loyalty is a huge factor. Big bloggers aren’t big just because they get XXXXX amount of daily traffic. They’re big because they have a huge fan base of loyal readers.

A simple tactic I’d like to observe in determining this is the use of Google Analytics. I’ll admit that I’m a stat-junkie in the sense that I spend almost all of my night life checking what the logs says, coming up with my own conclusion and taking down notes. They always say the number speaks for itself and its a popular saying for a reason.

Here are some of my findings.

The Direct Traffic Pie Chart

The more direct traffic you have, the more readers you have who are probably more loyal. In case you don’t know, direct traffic is the traffic that comes from people who directly type your URL in their browser. So it’s a clear indication that number is all the traffic from your loyal readers.

Direct Traffic Stats and New Visits %

Bounce Rate

Now we have bounce rate. It basically shows how many people leave your site and how quickly. The lower the number, the better. With bounce rate you can actually track whether your guest post on other blogs went on successfully or not as I’ve said above. It was inferred that the average bounce rate for a site is 40-65%. If that’s the case, then I’m doing alright!

Final Words

To end this lengthy article, I’d like to ask you to evaluate your own marketing strategy and whether it’s getting you QUALITY traffic or not. Remember, that conversion is what everything online is all about.

By focusing on converting visitors based on your own blog’s goal, you’re having a more concise and competent way of blog marketing and promotion. And yes, it’s better to get 10 visitors a day who will actually read your blog and even buy something than getting 100 who will just click away in a few seconds.

Related posts:

1. #1 Traffic Tip You Are Not Ready For

2. 3 Things to do When Your Traffic Spikes

3. 6 Simple Ways to Build Traffic!

One very well received new feature of our new design here was the “Favorites” section that I setup in our sidebar. Basically, it is a part of our blog where we selected our favorite articles that were no longer in plain view for our readers and made them more easily accessible.

Before I redesigned Blogussion, I wrote a little about this idea of creating a favorite post section in my article with tips on how to drive traffic to old posts. Some people really liked the idea, and I loved the idea myself – so I implemented it here.

I really think this is just an amazing way to keep old posts into circulation, and it has proven itself to do so. The two major effects we have seen so far from posts listed on this page are:

• Posts on this page have received more views and comments
• Their activity on social networking sites such as StumbleUpon was up from before this page was created

Charts are always a great way to back statements up, and here is a screenshot from Analytics for posts with the highest pageviews this week:

Posts buried pages back are now within the top 5 most viewed posts for the week

I hope that the above is motivation enough for you to follow this tutorial and implement this idea onto your blog. This is a really great way to put the spotlight back onto old posts. Now, I’m going to teach you how exactly to do it! It’s a pretty simple thing to setup really, so it shouldn’t take you very long. Alright, let’s get started!

Step 1: Create a Category

I told you this was going to be easy. For step one, all you need to do is create a category! Call it something like “Favorites.” This category is the key to setting up your favorite posts section on your blog.

Once you have setup this category, it’s time for you to start populating it with posts. So, what you need to do now is go through your articles and pick out your favorite ones. Once you find your favorite posts, just add them to your “Favorites” category.

This process may sound tedious, especially if you have almost 250 posts like we did (I love bragging). But, oddly enough I found it rather enjoyable to go through all of the old posts on this blog and pick out the best of the best.

Step 2: Downloading the “Latest Posts by Category” Plugin

I chose to use a plugin by a blogger I respect a lot, Alex Cristache from Blogsessive. I use his plugin both here on Blogussion, and my other blog Asnio. It’s a super plugin, and makes setting something like a favorite posts section in your sidebar super easy!

Just click the awesome box below to go over to Blogsessive page and download it real quick. Don’t forget to come back now!

Setting the plugin up is easy, and lucky for all of us Alex has written a highly detailed instruction manual for using the plugin. Don’t forget to check that out in the plugin folder included in the download.

Step 3: Setting the Plugin up

If you have a widgetized sidebar, then you can simply throw in the widget wherever you want. If you don’t use widgetized sidebars, I recommend you read the documentation over at Blogsessive so you can find all of the codes for inserting this manually.

Configuring the Widget Options

Lucky for those of us with widgets, customizing the output of this plugin is as simple as checking a few boxes.

In your Widgets panel, you will find all of the options for customizing this widget. But, the one important thing that you do is select your “Favorites” category under the Categories to display: section in the options.

Now that you have checked the box and saved the settings, you should see the list of your favorite posts on your blog. Like I said, there are many other options you may want to check out to make the best use of this plugin.

A great thing about this plugin is that it leaves plenty of room for customization. By default, you just have a simple list of these posts. But, with a little CSS you can make the output look great. I’ll share with you a few tricks I did to make my list look so great here.

Again, I highly recommend you read the documentation Alex wrote so you can get the full idea of how this plugin woks.

Can now hold more content with less scrolling

Splitting the list into two columns

All it takes to split these posts into multiple columns is a little CSS. Lucky for us, this plugin comes with its very own class names which makes styling it extremely easy. Alex really thought of everything when he created this plugin, I’ll tell you that much!

So to split these lists into columns, open up your stylesheet (usually style.css) and add the following lines of CSS in there:

li.lpbcWidgetPost {
	float: left;
	padding: 0 0 1em 1em;	/* adds spacing to the right and bottom of each item */
	width: 45%;		/* will probably need adjusting depending on the width of its parent */
}

Now, this is the part where I think I will lose some people – so don’t be afraid to ask me any questions about this in the comments section.

But basically the whole idea is to float all of the content within the <li> tag to the left, which will then align everything horizontally rather than vertically. You add a little padding to separate the content, and add a width so you can limit how many posts show per line. You can decrease this width so you can have three or more columns if you wish.

Thesis Users: Add Special Styling to your “Favorites” page

As you can see, the formatting at the top of our favorite posts page has a different formatting at the top then the rest of the category pages here have. I added these extra things to that page so people who visit it knew what kind of content was there.

Luckily this is very easy to change around and if you use the wonderful Thesis Framework, all you need to do is add a little code to your custom_functions.php file:

function custom_archive_info() { if (is_category('favorites')) { ?>
 <div>
 <div>
 <h1><?php single_cat_title(); ?></h1>
 </div>
 <div>
 <!-- CONTENT HERE -->
 </div>
 </div>
<?php }
else
 thesis_default_archive_info();
}
remove_action('thesis_hook_archive_info', 'thesis_default_archive_info');
add_action('thesis_hook_archive_info', 'custom_archive_info');

Code used from Sugarrae’s tutorial

Hoping for Similar Results

This technique has worked pretty well for us so far, and I would love to know what you guys think of it as well! I do hope that this was an easy tutorial to follow, and I am trying to improve my tutorial writing skills since the last one I wrote about how to create the orange RSS box we have here.

Good luck, and let us know how this technique has effected the traffic to old posts on your blog!

Related posts:

1. Looking Back into the Past – 20 of my Favorite Articles on Blogussion

2. Very Straightforward Methods to Draw Traffic Back to Old Posts

3. Tutorial: Create a Very Informative Archives Page

As we discovered on Monday, the more tag is a very powerful feature in WordPress. By simply using the more tag, or not using it has a significant impact on the chance of your post being read by the readers of your blog.

This is the second part of the “Breaking down the more tag series.” We talked about the advantages and disadvantages of using the more tag to display partial posts, now we will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of not using the more tag to display full posts.

So in the last article I went over the basics of the more tag: what it does, how to use it, and the advantages and disadvantages of using it to display posts. We found out that using the more tag did have some very useful advantages, but even though the list of disadvantages were less than the advantages – the tradeoffs seemed to balance themselves out.

I think the cases I bring up in this post will be a real eye opener to some, and some of the points are very interesting to think about. Maybe some of you will want to start removing the more tag, or maybe some of you will want to start using it after you read these points and take them into consideration.

Advantages

The items in this list have some surprisingly exceptional benefits for a strategy that isn’t used very much in the blogosphere today.

• Allows posts to be read without a catch - If you read the first post in the series, you will have learned that the more tag hides a part of your article and only shows a couple paragraphs, and a link that leads to the full post. Without the more tag, you will not have a link and your full post will show up on your homepage.
  
  As we also learned in the last post, the link that the more tag creates can be unappealing to many and they may not want to click the article. So without the more tag showing, there is no link to click and access to the content requires literally no effort.
• Affiliate link clicks can go up - When you make your content more available to your readers, they will be more likely to read it. When they read it, you may have interested them enough where content starts getting read more and more, and links start getting clicked more and more. If you think about it, there will be no barrier between a clicked affiliate link and one left unseen if access to your full content is right on the homepage.

Disadvantages

In my honest opinion, the disadvantages weigh out the advantages of excluding the more tag from your posts. The items in the list below are probably why so many people use the more tag rather than exclude it.

• Can create a HUGE, unappealing scrollbar -Large scrollbars are extremely unappealing to many people. If you have a large scrollbar, the chances are you have plenty of other problems with your site. Long page loading times, a cluttered look, and extreme repetition of the same styles just to name a few.
• Duplicate content - If you think about, having the full content on the homepage of your blog AND the single page of your blog can create a duplicate content issue. My SEO knowledge is not the best, but that sounds like duplicate content issues to me. And plus, if you display full posts in your archives, well, that can’t be helping you out too much either!
• Design clashes - I think that when you have all of your long posts on the same page, it will start to get very repetitive and start to look very unappealing. Yes, even you use the more tag to show shortened versions of posts, it an get repetitive. But, it looks worse design wise to show the full post and all of these different styles everywhere.

A short, but powerful list

I will admit that this list is a bit on the short side, but I tried not to write too much of the things you know already. I think the list is powerful, and each side does have its pros and cons – some that outweigh the other too.

Final Thoughts + Recommendations

So the use of the more tag in your posts has a great impact in the performance of your post. The use of the more tag in posts is the most common way to show posts throughout the blogosphere, and is probably the best for your blog in the longshot.

I do use the more tag on all of my blogs for many reasons. It’s SEO smart, it makes my designs look cleaner, doubles pageviews and many, many more reasons.

I hope you enjoyed this series, and I do look forward to hearing your thoughts and feelings on this issue. Until then, keep blogging strong!

Related posts:

1. Double Your Pageviews – Pros & Cons of Displaying Partial Posts

2. Pros and cons of long and short posts – The age old debate

3. 5 Ways you are Unknowingly Harming Your Posts