Getting traffic to visit our blog requires a lot of work, and making sure that traffic stays requires good content! Sometimes, though, we needlessly send traffic away even though we want them to stay! Here are some of the ways that I’ve found that sends traffic away:
1. too many ads – sometimes we place ads to get clickthroughs or sales, but we tend to give them preference over our content. In other words, we spend a lot of effort getting visitors, they visit, see ads and click away almost as quickly!
2. too many external links – perhaps our blogs have too many links on them that encourage visitors to click away. I’ve seen blogs that have lots of dozens of entries in the blogroll, each one is a temptation to click away, if the current post isn’t what you are interested in.
3. poor design – we all add features to our blogs like mailing lists, comments, purchasing plugins, etc. but we need to make sure that when we use these features, we don’t inadvertently send traffic away, by forgetting to enable options that send the customer back to your website. Here is a good example in the jpeg of a website that had a mailing list, I entered my name, and was taken to this page, but what do you not see? A way to return to the previous page, just an invitation to click to close the page. Boom! Visitor gone.
4. slow loading pages – often new bloggers add all sorts of crap on their new blogs to make sure that their new blogs look old. In fact, more often than not, new blogs look exactly new for that self same reason. But a much bigger problem is that, for various reasons, if the items aren’t loaded on your server, they must be taken from somewhere else. Quite often, these images will slow your server down; and occasionally, may prevent your pages from loading at all – I’ve had problems with Adsense in the past, Adbrite (too awful to mention), Payperpost Affiliate images, etc. And remember, millions of people still DON’T have broadband!
What other ways do we send traffic away? Have you ever made that mistake? Tell us your ideas!