In the last installment, I researched a few sites and made claims to the areas that stopped traffic. I think this type of discussion contains value for any blogger. I almost considered adding green lights and nailing a few sites, but I’ll keep to the current motif and only add stop signs to my case studies today. Be wary, though — green lights may be coming soon!

The idea of keeping traffic contained on our site should not be new to anyone who’s been blogging or site building for a while. At times, traffic can seem like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off — running around vapidly, then silently departing our world. How can we rein in traffic? We need visitors to dig deeper into our site, write comments, subscribe to feeds, and interact with our community.

Case Study #3

The Viral King website still has the new blog shine to it. The site features content related to viral marketing, and does so with, well, with coolness. I love the look of it, the curved angles of the sidebar boxes, the over-sized RSS feed and Technorati favorite icons in the header, and, of course, the Viral King character. It all ties together well, and I’m sure new visitors to the site would give it more than a second look.

The site has a lot of stop signs in place. Remember stop signs keep the visitor from bailing out on the content — they force readers to look deeper into the site and idle a while longer. I already mentioned the two icons in the header as well as the character, but I think the header navigation may be a critical stop sign in the design.

The navigation separates itself from the blog in that it stretches the width of the window, while the content maxes out at 973 pixels wide. This makes a difference, not for its incongruence, but for its statement. It’s telling a visitor that its anchoring the page. The search form also appears in the navigation bar. If you need something, it’s there to show you. I would say this is a terrific stop sign.

The Viral King also offers a free Viral Resource Report, which adds another crucial stop sign. Offering free information in the form of downloadable content places your site onto a reader’s hard drive. When they open the ebook days, weeks, or months later, they will likely make a return trip to your site and opine on blog posts. It’s a great stop sign technique.

Lessons Learned from Viral King

The Viral King displays the site navigation in a way that doesn’t detract from the site’s balance, but does illuminate the content. Having over-sized RSS and Technorati icons ensures readers subscribe to your content in order to find you later. Once again, it pays to have a clean site with well thought out placement of graphics. And the Viral King character, definitely shines.

A site should have stop signs in place to direct the traffic coming from various sources. An effective stop sign can lower bounce rates, increase visibility of monetization efforts, encourage RSS subscription, and ultimately provide more value to readers. I have noticed on my blog that my bounce rate increases from certain sources of traffic. This article does not illuminate strategies for one particular source of traffic but for all sources.

Site Visitors and Their Needs

Every site visitor has a need, whether its to educate themselves on a topic or simply to entertain themselves during their off hours. Every blog should likewise have a purpose. Affiliate marketing blogs would obviously be focusing content on marketing strategies, while SEO blogs would be helping their readers optimize their sites. But what happens if the reader comes in to the blog through a stale link and finds a post concerning a contest? Will they care to stop to read about the contest, and even further into the archives to determine what the blog represents? Can you entice them further into the site?

I think its best to work with examples, so I’ve traveled around to my favorite blogs and placed stop signs where I think visitors might be sucked in a little further to that site’s content. Let’s start out with Tyler Cruz.

Case Study #1

Tyler has a very unique and colorful site, where he describes his adventures as an Internet Entrepreneur. A site visitor would stop after seeing his logo for sure. They would also check out the Get Noticed area due to the nice finger graphic and its placement on the page. I also think his post titles do a good job of illuminating content in a bold, yet not overpowering, way.

Keep in mind I’m not looking at Advertising spots, but areas of design that encourage readers to stick around, read content, subscribe to a feed, etc. I think his RSS Feed area doesn’t attract my attention as much as it should. It could be muted by the over-sized ad banner or the pull of character graphics on the left side of the screen. It’s not terrible, by any means, but I think you have to look for it rather than have it pop out at you.

Lessons Learned from Tyler Cruz

It pays to have a unique logo and template for your site. The placement of certain graphics can weight one side of a blog too heavily and attract attention away from important activities like site subscription, but may also encourage advertiser activity on the site. In Tyler’s case, an advertiser would gain prime real estate and attention across the main ad banner, or along the side, as the eyes tend to be pulled in that direction.

Case Study #2

Ben’s site focuses on providing readers with blogging and website tips without the jargon. He’s mindful of usability standards when creating his blog archives, which include a separate Tutorials section. The site is based on Majestic, not WordPress. You may notice his template doesn’t look like some of the standard designs you see around the Blogosphere. Like Tyler’s site, he pulls readers into various parts of his blog through his graphics and design.

His site header seems to shrink every time I return. I think the header design does a good job of attracting the eyes towards the weighted right sidebar, with the tiny arrows directing you right. Above the sidebar, a visitor would stop to read the navigations as Ben has separated out various parts of his blog. It makes it quite simple for someone to visit the Tutorials section when they find his site looking to learn something.

His most discussed blog entries widget on the sidebar may also attract readers to dig deeper into his site content. It’s placement lower on the page also makes it appear after reading an entire article on his site. It’s positioned at the level where you would naturally look after reading. This works well to draw readers in and stop them from leaving the site.

Lesson Learned from Ben Barden dot com

Ben’s site teaches that subtle graphics can draw attention to different areas of a site. A breadcrumb trail can also place valuable links in front of readers, giving them the option to dig deeper into the content. His site also shows how the placement of certain items, like popular posts or recent comments widgets can be lower on the sidebar to encourage further exploration after a visitor reads the day’s article. Again, I think the only thing lacking would be more attraction to the RSS subscription service, although he does offer a helpful guide to RSS. I know I’ve pointed a few of my offline friends to his description just to save the hassle of IMing a dissertation on the subject.

Stop Signs and Traffic

Of course having great content, like the two of these sites, encourages readers to stay. Even with great content, a flawed design may let visitors off the hook sooner than you like.

These two case studies should have at least peeked your interest. How many stop signs do you have on your site?

This is a new series for Jason Boom dot com. These mini reviews take a look at what attracts readers to certain areas of your site. If you would like to be included in this short run series, please use the contact form to request your site’s inclusion in the upcoming case studies.

This week has showed me the power of social media sites like StumbleUpon. Sure I knew my site could receive tremendous exposure through stumbling, but I didn’t realize how quickly it could happen, and just how quickly it could dissipate. My recent article Ten Reasons to Write Well Not Good received a lot of exposure on StumbleUpon in a short amount of time. It was like one of those summer rains — soaking the site, then soon the sun was back out drying up the traffic.

I’m not complaining about StumbleUpon traffic. I received quality stats during that flash flood. My bouncerate was extremely low. I’m happy with the overall effect. I want to know how to sustain it. Does StumbleUpon traffic stop by a thumbs down? Does anyone have an article?

Happenings this Week

This week I wrote the previously mentioned article, which received the most hits of the week. I also wrote the two part series on How to Podcast with Audacity and Wordpress. I tried to name this article with a more SEO friendly title to see if it brought more organic traffic. So far its brought three visitors, who stayed over ten minutes a piece on the site. I’d say it pays to target your titles with specific keywords.

New Milestone! I’m not a RSS jockey, but I’ve been riding a fairly strong horse upward these past few weeks. I’ve surpassed 70 subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed, now’s your chance. It’s free.

Site Tweaks: I did add an ad above the Spottt widget. I think this ad relates to what a lot of my surfers have interest — making money with their blog. It’s Darren Rowse’s Six Figure Blogging course. You might want to check it out.

I’ve also added a Digg This button to each individual post page, below the article itself. I hope this encourages everyone to Digg their favorite Jason Boom posts from the past and in the future.

Guest Post I have been writing a guest post for a neighboring blog. I’ll update everyone next week when I’ve finished that post. It’s taking longer than expected.

Upcoming Explosions

This week should see the second episode of the Boombox podcast early in the week. I’ll also be writing about site traffic, nurturing killer ideas, and another top ten list. I’ll have a Powder Keg review thrown in there too, for those who enjoy the series.

Other’s Explosions

I’m really enjoying Stephan Miller’s blog of the same name. He discusses his adventures in making money online, his blog, and other ideas for productivity. He has a clear, distinct voice that carries his articles along swiftly. His recent article entitled Spread Your Feed details some finer details of an RSS feed, which I hadn’t even considered. This is why I love his blog. It’s taking things I know, and showing me them from a different angle. Good work, Stephan.

Andrew Pavelski is back this week with a new successful blogging article. His look at John Chow seems like a natural step for this new series. I can’t wait to see what next week brings. Andrew also had extremely well thought out posts during this week. Everyone should be reading his blog.

I also enjoyed The Blog Entrepeneur’s posts this week. His writing has definitely made me want to elevate my own posting style. Just take a look at this rant on Make Money Online blogs or this one about developing blogs that stand apart from the masses.

Last night I took the time to install the WP-cache plugin. I held off installing this plugin due to knowing nothing about it. I was afraid if I installed it, I might cripple my site, forcing me to ressurect an older backup then reconfigure. After reassuring myself, I stepped through the fear.

I figured WP-cache was a good solution since my site would sometimes hang while loading various ads on the sidebar. I knew a cache would fix those types of problems. So I searched the Blogosphere for information on completing the chore.

I found many sites describing the process. I found most of the trouble was with permissions. Thus another search began for securing Wordpress when using the wp-cache plugin. I found an article detailing how to handle security problems with the wp-cache plugin installation. It helped me straighten out some of the finer points. Once I finished with that, I tweaked an .htaccess file then checked out the wp-cache administration area.

Administering the Cache
You can modify how long a cache page remains on the server. The default of 3,600 seconds (60 minutes) seems like a good amount of time for the traffic I receive. I kept everything the way it was, after toying with all the settings of course. Then I went back to my home page and right clicked to select view source.

My page was loading in half a second! I wanted to see what other sites had in terms of speed. I felt like a grease monkey webmaster daring to look underneath the hoods of others’ sites. I knew Problogger uses the wp-cache plugin. His site would crash often if it wasn’t for the cache. I visited his page and right clicked to view the source. That’s when something interesting happened.

I understand why the Problogger site loads slower than my own. I do. That wasn’t the realization that occurred. What did occur? I discovered a few monitoring services Problogger uses. He very well could have written about all these services too, but I just found two sites in particular I had never heard about. I felt like a sleuth.

ClickTale.com: A site where you can record, watch and understand. The service looks amazing. Basically the hosted software records movements of mouse clicks then allows you to play back your own traffic history. I love the idea of it, but haven’t tried it out for any tests. I do remember Darrin talking about the heat map feature, which is also part of this service.

103Bees.com: This site analyzes search traffic to help you optimize your site. I’ve placed the code on my pages and will be monitoring how well it does. The service seems fairly good at what it does. I’m going to test it out for a few weeks, then write a little bit about the results.

It Pays to Look under the Hood
The exercise started out simple enough. I wanted to find out how my site’s speed measured up to other blogs. I found my site does serve up fairly well and I also found a few new tracking solutions. It’s just what I need — more stats!

Have you noticed an increase in my site’s load time?

A blog network can be a truly helpful tool to new blogs, so when Antonio Marques of Digital-Folders.com emailed me asking if I wanted to join his network I had to consider it. Many of you might not be familiar with Blog Networks just yet. They offer bloggers a way to connect to other blogs, both in content and in readership. The basic framework of any blog network revolves around helping each blog succeed.

The Digital-Folders network is a fairly new one, as compared to older, established networks like B5Media.com. Other than having links on the sidebar of other blogs back to my site, what benefit exists in joining a blog network? Can anyone join? I had these questions on my mind after Antonio’s initial email, so I asked him these questions and a few more. He’s graciously allowed me to post the responses to those questions. I’m still in the deciding mode, but I encourage those of you who want to experience the benefits of a blog network to check out Digital-Folders.com.

I would retain all rights to my blog, right?
Absolutely correct. We do not claim any rights on anything on the associated blogs. All content is owned by the authors and they can, at any time, break the association with us. It’s your blog and you steer it in any way you want. We may provide advice but again, it’s your blog.

The ad space on my site would be sold at 75% profit for me, correct?
Correct again. You’ll know for how much we are selling it and 75% of it is yours.

How much would estimate a site like my own would pull in for ad space?
This is probably the hardest question we face. It’s not easy to put a price tag on a space. We like to discuss this with the bloggers and know how much they would like to sell it for. Nonetheless, it’s always a fine balance: Too high and it won’t sell, too low and we’ll be loosing money. We like to start low and see what the response from advertisers is. The pricing is a progressive process, and prices can be easily changed to deal with changes in the growth of each site. For an estimate, you’ll have to tell me what spaces we are talking about and what the demographics for your site are.

Do I have any say so on who can advertise on my site?
As principle, we do not allow ads from suspicious sites or sites connected with anything illegal. We also steer away from gambling or adult sites. If you want to approve every advertiser, it’s possible to be done, or you can trust our editorial instincts. As for advertisers that we approach, we can guarantee that they will be relevant to your site and provide value to your visitors. And let’s face it, this is direct advertising: companies or sites usually don’t invest money on ad space that will not bring them some targeted visitors. But again, if you so wish, before putting an ad live we can contact you and ask your opinion on it.

Do you have quality standards you hope to meet with new blogs?

This question needs to be addressed differently for a blog integration (like yours) or for a blogger wanting to open a new blog with us.

In the first case, we have a “checklist” that every already existing blog needs to meet before either we approach the blogger or the blog is accepted. One of the main points is quality. We don’t mind if the blog is still small, but if the quality it shows looks promising for a steady growth (like yours), we will approach it.

or new blogs to be hosted by us, it’s a harder process since we have nothing to evaluate. On our application page for new blogs, we ask a brief description of what the blog will focus on. If we find the idea promising, we’ll take it. It’s risky since a blog is not only constructed by good ideas and it will probably require a good deal of tutoring to get it running.

In any case, both for integrated blogs and new blogs, we have an individualized training program where we discuss with the bloggers things that could be changed and/or improved to allow for a faster growth, so no blogger is alone on this ride with us.

Also, we try to regularly clean our list. What I mean with this is, if a blog drops in quality for an extended period of time and we can’t get the blogger to get back on it, we’ll probably drop it from our roll. Statistically, 95% of the new blogs around do not survive long. We try our best to reduce that “death rate” with our blogs, but if it simply can’t be brought back, we remove it from our inventory in order to maintain the quality level.

Thanks again, Antonio for answering my questions. I will be following up with Digital-Folders soon with an answer. In the meantime, what do you think, readers? Would you join a blog network? Do you think it would help your blog explode on the internet?