What is Bounce Rate? Seven easy steps to decrease the Bounce Rate of your Wordpress blog or website.

In order to run a successful website you should know your site metrics. One key metric you should be aware of is Bounce Rate.

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. This entrance can be from any page on your site. Use this metric to measure visit quality - a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages are not relevant to your visitors.

If you haven’t been tracking your users, you should start now. Google Analytics is free and awesome. Google Analytics - You can sign up here

To view the bounce rates for your website using Google Analytics. Sign in and go to the Bounce Rate report under Visitors > Visitor Trending > Bounce Rate.

Why monitoring Bounce Rate Metrics is important?

Lets assume you own a physical electronics store.To run your store successfully you will require a lot of foot traffic and once your customers arrive you want them to make transactions. Or at least surf the store, you never know as they can find something interesting and useful while surfing that they would like to buy.

Same rule applies to the online world and this process of getting more traffic and converting them to sales is called conversion. You invite customers to your website by investing both time and money on good content, email and affiliate marketing, paid search etc. And once your online users hit your website you would like to capitalize on that investment. 

Now this is where Bounce Rate Metric comes in handy. By measuring the bounce rate you can measure the effectiveness of your promotional marketing efforts. As you follow this metric at the landing page or the traffic source levels you can establish a baseline to track your success overtime.

We all spend a lot of money on conversions and this metrics can tell us where we are we acquiring quality traffic from and how successful we are on converting that traffic to sales or at the least have users stay on the site.

Bounce Rate metrics can be affected by a number of different variables. On an average bounce rate for your site should fall between 40 - 70%.  You can not convince all the site traffic to stay but if your Bounce Rate is more then 70% you are doing something wrong.

Bounce rate is a  great qualifying metric. Its a metric that helps you ask the right questions. Check the top web pages of your website from where people are entering the site and check there bounce rate. Remember as these pages are from where most of your online users are entering your site, you can determine by studying these pages if these pages are doing a good job.

How to bring down or decrease the bounce rate of your WordPress blog or website?

There are a number of measures that we can take to grab attention and compel users to stay on the site and thus decrease the bounce rate. I call them triggers or call to actions. Following are some of the steps that I follow rigorously and have been successful in decreasing the Bounce Rate for coolwebdeveloper.com over a period of time -

• Interesting Headline - Keep the title of your post interesting and should ignite quest to read the full post.
• Interactive Posts - Make your posts interactive by encouraging users to click on other useful links within your site. For example if you are writing a post on HP laptop, you can refer to previous posts you have written about HP laptop in this new article thus providing more options to your users.
• Best or Related Posts - Make sure your users can reach the Best or Related Posts from every page of your site.
  Wordpress Plugin you can use - Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
• BLOG’s design and SEO - Reconsider your blog’s navigation and overall theme design that could generate usability issues.

Thesis WordPress Theme has the following functions automatically built in, so you do not need to use these plugins if you are using this theme. Just as an FYI - This theme is already getting some great reviews around the blogosphere (you can see some testimonials here). You can download Thesis Wordpress Theme here.

But if you are using other themes, the following plugins will give you a similar look/effect.

• All in One SEO Pack - This plugin makes it easy for you to optimize your article titles and other meta tags. 
• Google Analytics - This plugin makes it easy for you to insert your Google Analytics code and start tracking your blog visitors.
• WP-Note - This plugin lets you insert notes in your article to make them stand out. Kind of similar to the yellow colored notes I have twice in this article.
• Wordpress Gravatars - This plugin lets you display Gravatars of your readers in the comments section and can put your Gravatar on top of your article to show who the article was written by.

• Error page - Make sure to use a 404 landing page on your blog or website. Users will hit this page if any link on your site is broken or not found. Using this page you can suggest your users about possible areas of site that can visit and might be interested in.
• Navigation - Easy to spot link to the Home Page. Use breadcrumbs feature for easier navigation. Categories and Posts should be easily visible on the site.
  WordPress Plugin you can use - Breadcrumb Navigation
• Not using relevant tags - One of the reasons why a lot of blogger’s and website owners have a high bounce rate is NOT using relevant tags while writing posts. Tag relevancy is very important. Users coming through Google or other sources are expecting to get the result based on there search keywqords. If you tags are not relevant, your bounce rate will definitely be higher. 
• Incentive Offers - If you have something to give away like Free themes, free e-books, free reports etc then you will always be able attract visitors to click on that link.
• Interactive Elements - Use interactive elements that would require users to take small actions, such as polls.

By following these check points consistently you will be able to reduce the Bounce Rate of your site.

Do you have a high or a low bounce rate? How has the bounce rate affected your blog? What methods did you find most efficient to reduce the bounce rate? If you have suggestions or want to discuss more about Bounce Rate please leave your comments.

Tips for using Twitter and not getting overwhelmed

About a week ago at work one of my coworkers saw the Twitter window at my desk. And he asked me “what do you use twitter for, I have tried this about an year ago, but it seemed just another way of fooling around and wasting time. And not to mention the distraction it brings to your desk.”

Well I gave him an honest answer and I am going to share with you what I told him -I do find twitter overwhelming in the beginning. And I used to spend a lot of my time reading tweets and participating in open discussions. Though I was spending a lot of my time on twitter, I would still not say it was a time waste. If you are following the right people and know the right tools, you can accumulate a lot of knowledge and can use twitter to expand your business by developing relationships.

e.g. If you are a startup blogger and you know nothing about online marketing, I would suggest you go to http://twitter.grader.com/search here you can search other users specialized in your niche and can interact with them directly, so you can search for online marketing in our case. Most of the times users on twitter are very helpful and knowledgeable.

@problogger, @shoemoney, @mashable are some of the users that I have been following even before I started blogging.

I’ve also found that Twitter isn’t something you can explain, and it’s not something you can understand until you’ve used it for at least a few days. You have to use it to get it.

Follow a very Moderate approach

When I first started using Twitter I’d wake up in the morning and try to read through all the tweets, or at least scan them. Then I’d try to keep up periodically throughout the day. It was stressful. And i was falling back on a lot of other important tasks.

So remember DO NOT TRY TO KEEP UP

Twitter will be there for you and you can login anytime to find all the useful tweets, don’t sit there refreshing your screen to wait for more tweets, you can use twitter search (http://search.twitter.com/) to go through all the tweets that you have missed at any time of the day.

Follow people that you can learn from

Don’t follow people simply because they follow you back. Also by following a lot of people you will fed with a lot of not so useful information which defeats the very purpose of you using Twitter, unless you have some other good reason.

Don’t be on Twitter all the time

Personally I always had hard time concentrating on other tasks if my twitter window is open. So like I said, I close it most of the time and open it a few times a day to see what’s going on. And to market my BLOG links or any other affiliations that make sense to me.

There should be a Full Stop on your tweets

Make sure you don’t tweet whole day long. Your followers might get annoyed and might stop following you. Tweet only about something that makes sense.

Reduce the number of feeds and emails.

If you use Twitter regularly, you can probably reduce your need for RSS (my favorite blogs are on Twitter anyways), email (you can DM people), IM, news sites, and so on. It’s nice to consolidate, as long as you use it intelligently. This will help in saving a lot of time by replacing a lot of stuff with twitter.

Twitter is a wonderful tool if used right. Wish you all the best for your tweets. Please leave any further comments or suggestions about using Twitter effectively and not wasting a whole lot of time while tweeting.

Follow me on Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/coolwebdev

Motivational phrases for startup blogger’s

When I first started blogging, my main idea behind blogging was to gather information and keep myself up to date with the info for efficiently making my regular work decisions and to be on top of emerging technologies for professional development. I have subscribed to a number of RSS feeds and I was a regular gold member and reader of number of tech blogs.

While following this habit my passion grew and I started my own blog to share my ideas and information gathered from my day to day work. I was getting around 200 hits a day at that time.

That is when a friend of mine suggested me to try making some money out of my blog. I have tried since then and it took me some time to start earning some amount of money. I would like to add here that first and foremost purpose of this BLOG is still to share accurate info and to help other techies for no cost involved.

Back to making money -

I know its very easy to give up initially and I have experienced this myself. A lot of blogger’s step in the blogging world thinking of making easy bucks. But slowly they began to realize that its not an easy job and requires a lot of hard work and patience, and on top of all a very knowledgeable and a very smart head above your shoulders.

Well I am sharing some of the motivational phrases that I have used for being energetic and motivational all the time. If you are a start up blogger I will suggest you print them out and hang them on a wall somewhere in your home office or behind your computer.

These phrases will always remind you to of the perseverance required for running a successful BLOG. And some of these phrases come from very successful blogger’s who are earning more then six figures. And always remember one thing - Always treat people as people, You will meet Internet personalities and famous people over your life span, but never undermine yourself. And treat all as people you meet everyday.

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

“Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”

“Yesterday’s failures are today’s seeds that must be diligently planted to be able to abundantly harvest tomorrow’s successes.”

“Don’t let the opinions of the average man sway you. Dream, and he thinks you’re crazy. Succeed, and he thinks you’re lucky. Acquire wealth, and he thinks you’re greedy. Pay no attention. He simply doesn’t understand.”

“Never Give Up”

“If you can make something for a little less than your competition, and sell it for a little more, then you’re doing OK.”

“Choose to blog about something that you can see yourself still blogging about in 3-4 years - it takes that long to build a successful blog.”

“You have to earn their trust, before you can make a successful sale.”

“you are enough”. You are enough to become a millionaire, you are enough to have an attractive partner, you are enough to fulfill your dreams. You don’t need to keep adding things to yourself, you need to take away the things that hold you back such as doubt, fear and limiting beliefs. You are enough to do [insert anything here].

“Follow your passion”

“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.”

Why social media is not catching up within the corporate setup?

Wikipedia definition - “Social media are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio.”

On a general scale for an average person, social media is a way of sharing your life on line. Or more precisely it is sort of like a bar. You can go order up drinks and play a game of pool with people that you might never have come across. It gives you an opportunity to interact, socialize in a civilized manner. Or you can either be a drunkard (spammer) and sink your overall value or how you are perceived at a bar (social media) due to irrational behavior.

Social Media is going to be corporate marketing tool of future, Its going to be an online virtual bank or virtual utilities portal where people will be able to perform all kind of e-commerce and fun stuff from one virtual place. So it becomes very important for big corporate houses to adapt this culture fast. But we have not seen this happening.

That brings us back to our question - Why Social Media is not catching up within corporate setup?

Lets take a look at the demographics of social media users. Social media is much popular amongst the 17-34 age group. They are people who are enthusiasts, evangelists or experts in social media field. Even if they are not experts but as regular users they do understand the importance of social media. Now for social media to work in a corporate setup, the decision makers have to be these people which clearly is not the case right now. But clearly, sooner or later when these group of social beings will rise up the corporate hierarchy, then surely social media will touch base more strongly than ever.

So does that mean in next 10 years, Social Media will play a major role in corporate’s web presence? Please leave your comments.

Do you have a digital identity yet?

Few things carry more value than your digital identity, and yet most web users have only a tenuous grasp of it. That’s because on the social web, identity is no longer just who you are. It’s who you know, how you know them and how much you want them to know about you. On the web, your identity is explicitly tied to your relationships, both with your friends and with the websites you visit.

With the social media services and ID’s provided by them like Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, Open ID and micro blogging platform like Twitter expanding there user base and blending in our day to day activities as a part of our routine just like eating and exercising. It is becoming more and more important to have a digital identity.

All of the above offer a way to take control of your social capital, that cache of "friend data" you carry with you as you sign up for and use different web services. They also all offer a more tangible advantage — an easy way to log in to any website using one set of credentials. You get one virtual ID card that gives you access to hundreds of websites. As a bonus, you don’t have to go through the painful process of filling out a profile and adding or approving friends on every new blog, community or social network you want to join.

Do you have a digital identity yet? The good thing is If not its not hard to get :)

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