Blog Bounce Rate: What it is and How You Can Reduce it

Posted: 10 Nov 2016 08:09 PM PST

Your blog: you work hard on it.

It's understandable, then, that you want people to interact with it.

For a blogger, nothing is more heartbreaking than knowing that nobody is reading your blogs– despite the fact that you've spent hours or days working on each piece.

Unfortunately, many bloggers find themselves in this exact situation!

Luckily, though, there's something you can do about it. By understanding bounce rates, you can take proactive steps to lower yours – starting today.

What is a "Bounce Rate"?

A bounce rate is the number of readers who abandon your site after visiting one page. A high bounce rate is discouraging and bad for SEO. Because Google evaluates the behavior of users to determine how to rank your page, the search engine interprets a high number of "bounces" to mean that the page is low-quality.

With this in mind, decreasing your blog's bounce rate is critical to ranking well.

How to Lower Your Blog's Bounce Rate: 5 Fast Tips

If your blog's bounce rate is higher than you'd like, follow these five tips to decrease it:

1. Make your blog posts easier to read

If your content is clunky, difficult to read, or formatted poorly, readers are going to leave. If you use WordPress, a plugin like Yoast SEO can help you format your content. For everyone else, here are some tips to get started:

Break up large chunks of content. Dense paragraphs are a reader's worst enemy. To make your content user-friendly, break it into paragraphs of no more than 3-4 sentences.
Use subheaders. Subheaders are great for readability and SEO. To use them correctly, insert them into your text at 300-word intervals. Format them with the H2 tag and include relevant keywords.
Simplify your language. Simple language is easier to read. Ideally, every post you write should feature an 8th-grade reading level. If you're not sure what an 8th-grade reading level looks like, enable the Flesch-Kincaid feature in Microsoft Word, or use an app like Hemingway.

2. Make your headlines irresistible

While 80% of people read headlines, only 20% read body copy. This means that the better your headlines, the higher the chances people will stick with your content rather than "bouncing" off of your page.

To make your headlines more exciting to readers, use action words, address the reader directly, and run your headline through a tool like the Advanced Marketing Institute's headline analyzer before you publish it.

3. Limit the ads on your blog

According to HubSpot, 73% of users dislike online popup ads, and 91% believe that ads are more intrusive today than a few years ago. What's more, Google announced earlier this year that it will start punishing sites that display disruptive pop-up and interstitial ads.

With this in mind, be careful with ads on your blog. If you're going to show ads, stick with small banner ads at the top of the screen – the type that the user doesn't have to click past before they can access your content.

4. Build out your link strategy

To make your blog more appealing, create a good link strategy. Ideally, you should have a healthy mix of internal links (links to your site or content) and external links (links to relevant third-party sources) in your content.

To use links correctly, attach them to relevant anchor text and use sources with a domain authority score of greater than 50.

5. Add visuals to your blogs

While adding a picture or a screenshot to your blog may seem simple, HubSpot reports that adding a colored visual to a piece of content boosts people's willingness to read it by 80%. With this in mind, use in-depth screenshots, quality stock photos, or personal images to illustrate the key points of your blogs.

Smaller Bounce Rates Start Here

While decreasing your blog's bounce rate may seem insurmountable, these five tips make it easy to get started. By making your content more readable, improving your headlines, limiting ads, building out your link strategy, and improving your content with visuals, it's easy to slash your bounce rate and start reaping the benefits of lingering readers.

Dave is the CEO of Dave's Computers Inc. He writes a weekly column for Daily Blog Tips covering the best tips about blogging and Internet marketing. You can also find him on LinkedIn.

Original post: Blog Bounce Rate: What it is and How You Can Reduce it

5 Ways to Find Blog Design Inspiration Offline

Posted: 10 Nov 2016 01:07 PM PST

Your blog's design and layout is something that takes time, careful planning, and careful attention to detail. But have you ever paused to think about where you're getting inspiration for your design? If you're only copying other blogs, are you really doing anything unique? Instead, maybe you should turn your attention towards the offline world.

Five Places to Look for Inspiration

It may seem strange to look offline for design inspiration, but remember that you're trying to stoke your creativity – not mimic what everyone else is doing. When we study other web design projects, we find it difficult to look deep into them and see what's really happening. Instead, our natural inclination is to copy what they're doing. However, when you study other artistic mediums, you're able to look at them for what they are.

With that being said, here are a few specific offline places you should look for web design inspiration.

1. Product Packaging

Believe it or not, you can gain a lot by studying product packaging. You don't even have to leave your desk to perform this little exercise. Look at the various items in your office and study the various things they do. Notice how they deal with folds, use different textures, and combine colors to emphasize particular elements.

Not getting good vibes from the product packaging you have on hand? Feel free to browse the web for some unique selections – such as these. How can you implement similar techniques in web design?

2. Store Windows

"With the emergence of online retail, shop windows are under increased pressure to appeal to potential customers. This pressure has generated tremendous amounts of creativity in the field of shop window design," Wix points out.

The design lessons you learn from store windows will prove especially valuable when it comes to designing ecommerce homepages. While the medium is different, the goal is the same: get people to view and purchase products.

3. Magazines and Catalogs

When was the last time you paid attention to magazine and catalog design? It's actually a lot like web design. There's a cover – the homepage – and an internal hierarchy of complimentary pages. There are also a wide variety of sizes, materials, colors, and layouts. Flip through those catalogs you have stacked up next to your desk and see what's hiding within. Tear out pages you like and tack them up on your bulletin board. Before long, you may start to develop a new sense of style.

4. Art Galleries

There are art gallery aficionados and then there are those people who only visit an art gallery when they're inadvertently confronted with one while on vacation. If you fall into the latter category, then you actually have more to gain from visiting a gallery.

When you walk into an art gallery, you're confronted with a wide variety of displays – often consisting of sculptures, paintings, and drawings. Each has a unique flare and can send your wheels spinning.

5. Architecture

Finally, there's much to be gleaned from studying different types of architecture. From the different materials used and the unique floor plans to the changing elevations and placement of windows and doors, every home is unique in its own right. As such, there's much for you to learn.

Don't Limit Yourself

Whether you're suffering through a prolonged period of designer's block or simply want to change things up, make sure you're looking beyond web design for inspiration.

Specifically, turn your attention towards offline elements like product packaging, store windows, magazines and catalogs, art galleries, and architecture. You may be surprised by what you discover.

Original post: 5 Ways to Find Blog Design Inspiration Offline

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