More Blog Stickiness

By Jordan McCollum on May 30, 2007

More Blog Stickiness

Still working on getting your blog readers to stick around? If you’re on WordPress, you’re in luck. Technosailor’s Aaron Brazell has compiled a list of plugins designed to help improve your blog’s stickiness. What do these plugins do?

Greet visitors from search engines with a list of relevant posts.
Enable visitors to subscribe to comments.
Display your most popular posts.
Easily interlink series of posts.

ProBlogger led me to the post, and there are even more useful plugins mentioned in the ProBlogger comments, including ones that enable you to:

Greet returning visitors/commenters.
Send a thank you e-mail to commenters.
Remove nofollow selectively or completely from commenters (as Andy Beard mentioned in our comments).
Add the magic sentence Nate Whitehill mentioned (from our first post on blog stickiness).

Why am I so obsessed with blog stickiness? Because for many bloggers, that’s one of our only goals–a low bounce rate. Also, other important blogging goals can be related to this, such as subscriptions and possibly affiliate or direct sales.

How have you improved your stickiness?

Similar Stories in: Advice, Blogging | Forward: Email This Post

7 comments on “More Blog Stickiness”

Andy Beal Says:

May 30th, 2007 at 4:48 pm

Best things I’ve implemented on this site for stickiness…

1. Related posts – that seems to help create links to other similar theme posts.
2. Subscribe to comments plugin – that brings people back to the conversation.
3. The obligatory “like this post, subscribe…” at the end of each post.
4. “Popular posts” – I actually compiled this manually based upon what I thought would be of the most interest to first-time visitors.
Drew Stauffer Says:

May 31st, 2007 at 10:30 am

I recently wrote “website promotion with wordpress plugins” that can help out with SEO issues that might be of interest to your readers too.

http://www.alibiproductions.com/2007/05/28/website-promotion-with-word press-plugins/

Andy, was the “like this post, subscribe” a plugin?
Andy Beal Says:

May 31st, 2007 at 11:10 am

@Drew – no, just coded into the post template.
Drew Stauffer Says:

May 31st, 2007 at 12:46 pm

@Andy – Ahh doi, I gotcha thanks
mike dibenedetto Says:

December 18th, 2008 at 11:28 am

I love the idea of a greeting page for search engine traffic. but are there any studies/tests that show it’s effectiveness at increasing stickiness. I’m thinking about doing it for my site but am not sure if it’s worth the investment.

mike dibenedetto’s last blog post..Taking a Vow of Non-Violence with Deepak Chopra
Jordan McCollum Says:

December 18th, 2008 at 11:39 am

@Mike—Having a paragraph inserted to a page based on the referrer is one thing, but redirecting search traffic to an entirely different page than what they thought they clicked through to is a big no-no according to SE’s guidelines (and violating user expectations can backfire, too).

On the other hand, tailoring the existing landing pages of your site is always a good idea. Here’s our latest post on that:

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/12/test-your-way-to-higher-conver sions.html
Dan Callahan Says:

February 25th, 2009 at 1:13 am

great stuff!!!

Dan Callahan’s last blog post..Few More Links RS

Marketing Pilgrim