Most web managers and content creators treat visitors like movie goers – once the ticket is purchased, it doesn’t matter if they stay for the whole film. The truth is, the longer someone stays on your content, the better opportunity you have to engage them further, whether for a sale, newsletter sign-up or another goal. Having bounce-proof content means that the majority of visitors who take an intentional route to your page will be engaged to the point that they can’t look away. In fact, they look for more and stay for the sequel.
This is no easy feat as mentioned in the previous three parts of this series. The average visitor stays just long enough to read 20% of a page’s content. This translates to mean our efforts to attract visitors is much more successful than our ability to keep them interested, but there are things we can do.
With a primary focus on finding the reasons we leave an article without reading it, I decided to dig into this subject and find out how myself and others can create bounce-proof content. In addition to doing my own research, I surveyed others using these four questions:
- What causes you to click on a piece of content to read?
- What is the quickest way to get you to click off of a piece of content?
- What are some additional things that cause you to close an article or stop reading?
- How can this be avoided (clicking off of an article before reading it)?
What Makes Content Bounce-Proof?
- Engagement
- Avoiding Pet-peeves
- Direct Headlines
- Sacrifice Quantity for Quality
- Grammar Check
- Play to Different Reading Styles
- Platform-Proof
Other Quick Tips:
- Provide immense value in the first 10 seconds.
- Make sure internal links go to external pages to avoid losing visitors.
- Use polls, questions and surveys to engage your audience.
- Embed videos and curate content instead of incentivizing your visitors to go somewhere else.
I’d like to end this series with the most simple and obvious, yet most helpful tip – ask your readers. Sure, you will have random visitors click on and off of your website, but no one knows what you provide better than your faithful customers, and what you need to improve on. Ask for open and honest feedback from your network and those who know the most about your work. Make a conscious effort to improve the copy on your website and content in your articles, and the users will come back again and again.
Additional Reads: 10 Ways to Keep Visitors On Your Website Longer, 5 Ways To Keep People On Your Website, 4 Subtle But Important Ways To Keep People On Your Website Longer
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Thank you to the Clicking Off Content contributors: Lili Balfour, Thomas Cambria, Francisco Godinez, Catherine Juon, Chirag Kulkarni
Tomorrow’s Post: Was Confucius Wrong? Job vs. Occupational Happiness
Interested in Why I’m Publishing 365 Times in 2015? Read the first post of 2015 here! Want to be a part of the series? Share topic ideas or volunteer for an interview in the comments below.
Michael Luchies is the Founder of TrepRep, Director of Content Programming forPursuit, Interview Editor for Under30CEO, Entrepreneurship Lecturer at Illinois State University, TEW 2 contributor, and writer of all things entrepreneurship. Connect with Michael on Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.