Increasing Blog Stickiness

Everyone strives to keep those reader for one more pageview, for one more clickthrough. I would advise you to do whatever possible to make the reader stick around – make your blog a sticky blog.

I was gradually implementing several techniques myself on my blog, such as:

1. Header redesign, to grab readers’ attention on arrival. This is also useful in the battle against hit-and-runners.

 

2. Featured articles in my header, to showcase my most useful, or otherwise interesting articles worth keeping afloat.

 

3. A great Archives plugin, that makes you archives a lot user-friendlier than the standard archives on WordPress. This one gives the reader a way to appreciate you content at a glance and I am already reaping the fruits of this.

My Latest Addition

I’ve just installed a ‘related posts’ plugin. This is a great achievement for me because it has been postponed over and over for more than two months now.

The delay was mainly because plugins for this functionality use the blog’s database to compare different parameters of your posts to display the related ones. And, when I tried to install one I would eventually get some sort of an error having to do with access restrictions or even more complex errors I didn’t have a clue how to fix.

Several days ago I decided that enough is enough and after some online research and a a couple of offline trials I installed the Aizatto’s Related Posts plugin.

It works straight out of the box, and does everything it supposed to. I’m still trying to decide how much relation is there between the posts displayed, but I guess something is better than nothing for now.

And Another One

Another new addition to this blog is a little off topic, but nevertheless a useful one. I installed a threaded comments plugin to create a better commenting experience for my readers. The plugin I chose is Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin, also because the others that are available messed with my blog.

I wouldn’t recommend this sort of a plugin to every blog. My guess is that blogs that fit best to use these are those getting less than ~15 comments per post, otherwise the comments section would become too cluttered, and it would be better to reply to several commentators in one comment.

In the meanwhile I will try it and see how it goes, the author says its effect is reversible.

In the Near Future

I’m going to install an avatars (gravatars) plugin that going to display readers’ gravatars within the comment. This would, hopefully, make the occasional commentator come back for more as everyone likes to see their personal imprint on someone else’s work!

- Alex