Make more money with your site – part 3 – session length

Welcome to the 3rd and final part of the mini-series Make More Money with your site. You know by now how to build a quality site and how to acquire visitors to your page. Today we will talk about how to keep these visitors on the site for as long as possible. The longer they stay, the more money you can (generally) make. Research says that over 70% of people who abandon your site never return… Sad news. Session length is crucial for maximizing revenue from current and future visits. So, how can you get your visitors to stick around a bit longer and hopefully return to your site you may wonder? Let us give you our best tips and tricks.

Quality content

We can’t stress this enough. Content is KEY when it comes to attracting visitors and keeping them there. There are tons of different ways you can keep your visitor interested in your content. Lookup a great SEO guide that will help you gain organic traffic. Keep in mind that your content still needs to be king in order to keep your bounce rate to a minimum. Popular content topics are news, helpful articles within your field of business and expertise as well as educational guides and “how-to” posts. Our previous post gives great insight into how and what content to produce.

Site layout and content suggestion

This goes hand in hand with site quality. It’s crucial for your session lengths to guide your visitors to the next related article and plan your page in a way where your visitors want to stay as long as possible. Infinity scroll is a great way to provide more and more content and the visitor might not even realize you are actually ‘manipulating’ them to stay longer on your site by providing personalized content. If you want to dig deeper, things such as background, content flow, and focal points all have an impact on how long your webbie visitors stick around. Internal linking and content suggestions are also great ways to keep your visitors stay a bit longer. “Other similar articles” and “suggestions for you” that most news and entertainment sites such as Netflix uses are not there by coincidence 😉

Give your UX design a second thought

Don’t play hide and seek with your visitor, they should find what they are looking for within seconds, or they will look for it somewhere else. The web is overfilled with information today if you aren’t communicating your message clearly enough and if your content is not interesting enough, it’s very easy to move forward to the next in line. Ditch complex navigation and exhausting graphics on your site. Less is more sometimes. Save your energy (and budget) for producing killer content instead 🤓

Interactive experiences

There’s a huge difference between exhausting graphics and interactive experiences. The latter can drive loads of amounts of traffic to your site and also keep them there. I don’t think anyone has missed the fact that video is a great piece of media for gaining attention. If your budget is not suitable for video production (it’s really not that expensive today) you can always try to add interactive experiences by for instance making your content a slideshow. Other popular interactive media formats are GIF, animation, audio or game. Make sure the content is relevant for your business and audience since making interactive media is not the cheapest, you want to make sure it pays back the buck.

Page load

Now that we got you all excited about interactive media and all the cool opportunities that bring along, we want to give you a friendly reminder to keep your page load to a minimum. Even a 1-second delay in page load can harm your session length. Make sure to compress all videos and images on your site to the smallest size possible (hey jpeg, bye png). There are even plugin compressors for lazy WordPressers. You can use CDN servers to fasten the content delivery from the closest geographical location. We can go on and on about this topic but we highly encourage you to look up some best practice page load guides, read them and implement them!

Bots

With bots, we do NOT mean for you to use bot traffic, that’s something you should stay very far away from. No, we are talking about chatbots or lead bots which help the visitors find what they are looking for. Bots can be used in so many ways. They can either be fully automated or partially manned by employees. You can chat with your visitors (which ofc lengthens the session) but even more importantly you create a relationship with your visitor and convert them into returning visitors and clients. Lead bots are designed to lead the client to the correct place by asking ready set questions. A chatbot works as any chat, you get real-time support or get directed to the correct place 🤖

CTA

Last but not least, don’t forget about call-to-actions. Although it’s cool to have visitors hanging around, it’s quite crucial to get them converted into returning visitors, newsletter subscribers or clients. Provide relevant CTA’s on strategic places on your site for maximizing the chances of visitors acting upon these. Insert cookies to remind your visitors to re-visit you and place an exit intent-pop up – a last attempt to get them to stick around longer.

We hope you have enjoyed this small series on how to make more money with your site. With these tips implemented you are ready for maximizing revenue from your website. If you want to try out ads, don’t hesitate to contact us by dropping a line to sales@kiosked.com.

Happy monetizing!

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