For the people oblivious to the meaning of Bounce Rate: a visitor can bounce by closing an open window or tab, typing a new URL, clicking the “Back” button to leave the website or have a session timeout. The bounce rate for a blog is the number of site visitors who only visit 1 page of that blog per visit, divided by the total number of blog visits.

According to google.com analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik, a bounce rate over 50% is worrying, over 35% there is cause for concern and it is really hard to get your stats under 20%.

Like I mentioned in my post about EntreCard the other day, my BounceRate is in the high seventies so looking at Avinash´statement I should really break down and cry or better yet, decide whether that bounce rate really is all that important to me right now at this stage of my blog.

Having a high bounce rate (a percentage well over 60%) means one of two things (and sometimes a combination of both); either you are targeting or attracting the wrong visitors or your site is of poor design overall.

Although there is definitely a lot to tweak and improve on my design, I prefer thinking that my high bounce rate is actually caused by the use of EntreCard, getting anywhere between 100 and 300 visits through that system daily. And as we all know most droppers are bouncers, only looking for the widget to drop and move on to the next one.

Am I going to break down and cry? Well of course not! I actually do appreciate all the traffic I am receiving, it is driving Alexia ranking up (you just never know when that could be useful, plus it is getting personal now, wanting to reach 100,000 within 3 months of starting this blog) plus I notice more and more people are coming back, leaving comments and start participating.

Am I truly satisfied? Well of course not!
There is always room for improvement, especially when only just starting out. So a few weeks ago I signed up for Google Analytics to be able to have a closer look at where all these wonderful readers are coming from.

By the way, if you have been struggling to add the code to your blog in order to have the tracking process started, I recommend you to use the Google Analyticator plugin for WP,  allowing you to add the tracking code without having to change anything in your core code.

I must admit, I really don’t like touching core codes (especially not late in the evening when running a high risk of screwing up the whole system) and I have been putting off signing up for google analytics for too long, but with that plugin it is a real breeze to set up and as much as I don’t want to depend on Google, the Analytics rock!

Now is as good a time as any to actually start focussing on lowering that bounce rate while not going down on traffic, but since I really don´t want to go cold turkey on EntreCard I will keep using it and apart from that I will be spending quite some time over the next weeks on building more backlinks and of course I will be sharing my lists with you guys, so stay tuned for that!

I am curious though, care to share your bounce rate and steps on how to improve, or do you really just don´t care about stats and ranks? 

Popularity: 53% [?]

During yet another EntreCard dropping session I just kept wondering why the hell this has become such an addictive habit. At the moment my ad “sells” for 173 credits because I have switched to a faster way of dropping and to be completely honest, I do get most of my traffic through EntreCard at the moment.

I have tried different things to drop faster, like using sitehoppin and powerdroppin, in combination with the Firefox add-ons like ImgLikeOpera (to make sure the only image loaded is the EntreCard widget) and bookmarked a list of random sites with their EntreCard above the fold, to open up different taps at the same time. This tactic lets me drop around 200 cards in about 30 minutes, giving me quite some possibilities to advertise on different blogs each day.

Now, even though at first I thought this was quite nifty, my opinion is shifting towards the feeling that I am destroying my own options and am guilty of defeating the whole purpose of Entrecard, building up quality traffic.

Google analytics stats show a bounce rate that I am quite ashamed of so I was thinking of ways to get that percentage down, which is going to be my goal for the coming period and part of my plan of action is starting to drop wiser.

You see, I did not really care where I would drop my card, whether it being on blogs about sports, blogging, history, or whatever site was on the lists of bookmarks readily available online. But by doing this I am actually inviting fast droppers to my blog, the ones that only enter to drop and leave, just as I have been doing lately as well.

Now, thinking about which blogs actually draw my attention, they are all related to only a few categories, and they are the only ones where I do take the time to read the titles and posts, even visit and read more posts and comment on the ones I enjoyed or which have taught me something new.

This train of thought is leading me to think that possibly, those bloggers could be doing the same thing, being involved in certain categories; their attention probably will be caught by blogs in those same categories as well.

I still believe Entrecard is an awesome system for beginning blogs who haven’t yet gotten a huge amount of back links and contacts, but only if it is being used in the right way, so I guess my days of EntreCard whoring are over and I am going to focus more on quality drops…

Who knows, it might just do wonders for my bounce rate

Are you using EntreCards to your advantage or are you just playing the system?

Popularity: 63% [?]