Are you looking for ways to get more eyeballs on your content? Getting more visitors to one’s blog is essentially what most bloggers are struggling to accomplish on a daily basis. There are numerous ways to drive traffic but you only need to learn how to implement a few of the most effective ones to see significant and instantaneous results. In this column, I will share the single most effective technique, in my experience, to drive traffic to your blog.

So you are probably wondering what it is. Is it writing good content and flashy headlines? Submitting posts on Reddit? Syndicating your content on Twitter and Facebook? Not really. While those are highly effective techniques that every blogger should be using on a regular basis, the one that I want to talk about is leaving comments on other blogs and networking with fellow bloggers. By using this technique effectively, you will be able to drive highly targeted, quality traffic and bring you the kind of readers who are the most likely to have interest in reading and sharing your content.

Yes, commenting can get you a very sizable amount of quality traffic and it is probably the most overlooked technique for the vast majority of bloggers. Actually, I wouldn’t hesitate to single out commenting as the main driver in growing Anomalous Material into one of the most active community on LAMB and leaving comments is still something that I personally do on a daily basis.

Just as importantly, it will help you build a community around your blog, a group of loyal readers who will visit you on a frequent basis (as long as you keep reciprocating). Let’s face it, it’s always nicer to talk to a group of people rather than the internet ether. So how do you go about using this technique to drive traffic to your blog?

• Participate in blogs in your niche: One of the first place to start is to look around on LAMB for blogs that closely match your own blogs’ interest. Then simply bookmark those so you can visit them on a frequent basis and start participating in the comments. Don’t forget to leave your blog’s URL!
  
• Leave insightful comments that reflect positively on you: By commenting on other blogs, I don’t mean one-liners like “Great review”, “Thank you for this”, or other random rubbish. One-liners are frowned upon and don’t bring anything to the conversation, you are better off not saying anything if you don’t have anything better to post. The longer and more insightful your comment, the better and they should be such that you engage with the author, talk about the post and/or add some additional information related to the post!
• Build a presence: Be everywhere all the time! Doing so will allow you to gain authority as a member of the wider movie blogging community. As such, you will be like the cool guy or gal that everyone wants to hang out with :) 
• Answer your comments: While not every single comment needs to be answered, it’s definitely very perplexing to see blog owners who seem to ignore their visitors when they are obviously getting few comments to begin with. Don’t be surprised if those visitors don’t come back if you leave them to dry.The key is to nurture the budding relationships that you have started to build by keeping the conversation going and going…
• The Law of Reciprocity: Whatever you want others to do for you, you must do the same for them. An important aspect of commenting is that you need to reciprocate when people comment on your blog and should expect your commenting to be reciprocated as well. Fletch recently ranted “I stopped following/reading your site because you don’t reply to comments and/or reciprocate.” and I personally subscribe to this way of thinking. If I’m currently participating on your blog, and you are not reciprocating, it’s very likely that I will stop visiting your blog in the near future.

I hope you found this month’s blogging tips informative and helpful. Do you think commenting is important to you? Do you feel that comments and visits should be reciprocated among bloggers? Do you have questions or request for next month’s column? Let us know in the comments.

Castor is the author of the movie blog Anomalous Material and can be contacted at castor[at]anomalousmaterial.com.

Do you find yourself checking your analytics multiple times daily? It’s a fact that bloggers love to look at their statistics and rightfully so. Much can be learned from paying attention to what your analytics package is trying to tell you. Most bloggers focus on the number of visits or the number of pageviews but what do all the other numbers mean and which ones are important? In this month’s edition of the LAMB’s Blogging Tips, I am going to explain why the five following blog statistics are ones you need to track.

Note: As you will see below, Google Analytics is the golden standard in terms of analytics package and I strong recommend you using it even if you are already using something else such as Sitemeter or StatCounter.

1. The Bounce Rate

One of the most confusing stat for many bloggers is the bounce rate. This metric measures the percentage of visitor who leave your blog without clicking on anything. If three people visit your blog and only one click on a link to read your review of Turtle Mutant Ninja Turtles, your bounce rate is 66.7%. Hence the lower your bounce rate, the better. Now, you may ask what a “good” bounce rate may be but it all depends on individual circumstances. The important thing is to track this number and work to lower it over time.

2. The Average Time on Site

Another important metric to keep track of is the average Time on Site (not to confuse with the average Time on Page). This number is particularly useful to gauge whether your visitors find your blog boring. While no one can objectively know whether his blog is boring or not, the cumulative vote from all visitors is a big tell. A higher time on site (for movie blogs) indicates reading behavior pattern (e.g. a lot of peeps reading your posts) while a low average indicates that a big fraction of your visitors leave your blog right away.

A rule of thumb is that anything below 2 minutes is below average while anything under 1 minute is a major red flag. You can also combine your bounce rate and average time on site to have a more accurate picture of how interesting your blog is. The most desirable indicator being a high average time on site combined with a low bounce rate while a low time on site and high bounce rate would indicate that you need to shake things up.

3. Your Top Traffic Sources

AM’s Top 10 Sources (Click to Enlarge)

Knowing where your traffic comes from is important because it allows you to know how people get to your blog. For example, direct traffic is usually from people who have bookmarked your blog and come back on a regular basis. Referrals from Feedburner is another way for your most loyal readers to access your content while referrals from IMDB tend to be highly targeted as shown by the below average bounce rate. By tracking who is sending you traffic, you can quickly learn what are the most productive avenues for you to focus your energy on and not waste your time on ineffective techniques such as exchanging links (minimal incoming traffic in my experience) or maybe sending tweets to your 50 followers.

More importantly, you can gain further insight using the average time on site and bounce rate by analyzing which traffic sources are the most productive. As shown above, not all traffic sources are created equal. Social media such as Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon tend to send a lot of very short-term traffic. The vast majority of these visitors will not stick around very long, will not click on any links or leave comments. This is reflected in the high bounce rate from these sources.

4. Your Top Content

AM’s Recent Top Content (Click to Enlarge)

Much like knowing your top traffic sources, being aware of your top content sheds a lot of insight into where most of your visitors usually land or click. Most blogs will have a handful of pages that seem to get the overwhelming numbers of views and knowing which ones can help you make many important decisions:

• What type of content your readers enjoy and should you write more post like those?
• Should you update or optimize your most popular post and point your readers deeper into your blog?
• Is there something wrong with my template? (High bounce or exit rate on your homepage)
• Are people actually reading my posts? (Low Avg Time on Page)

5. The Overall Trend

AM’s Monthly for 2010 (Click to Enlarge)

All the numbers above are insightful and useful to look at but one shouldn’t overly obsess about these statistics. The most important things to consider are the overall trends for your blog. Are you getting better at not only writing but also marketing your content? Is your blog growing, stagnating or even shrinking? With a bit of energy and commitment, a healthy blog should be growing on a near constant basis (month-to-month) be it in terms of visits, pageviews, comments, ad income or whatever your objectives are.

If your blog has grown stagnant for several months, it’s time to shake things up. Try a new voice, new content, and a new perspective. Redouble your efforts to network with fellow movie bloggers. Brainstorm on what you can improve and do it!

I hope you found this month’s blogging tips informative and helpful. What blogging statistics are the most important to you? Do you have questions or request for next month’s column? Let us know in the comments.

Castor is the author of the movie blog Anomalous Material and can be contacted at castor[at]anomalousmaterial.com.

(Editor’s Note: When Castor at Anomalous Material came to me, asking if he could submit one or two articles about better blog design, I offered him a monthly feature. At AM, Castor has posted many articles with great tips on making your blog an overall great place to be. AM also hosted the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog project in August ‘10, with loads of participation. Think of this as an “advice” column of sorts. I’m sure questions are welcome. And if anyone can think of a good name for this new feature, the floor is open to suggestions. -Rachel)

Have you been blogging for some time and are grieving over the fact that after all that effort, Google Analytics keeps telling you that no-one is coming? Are you wondering why you never seem to get any comments or any sign of life from the people “visiting” your site?

Dear fellow movie bloggers, this is your first step toward greater understanding! Here are 3 brutal reasons why people might click away from your (movie) blog before they ever even read a sentence of your content.

1. Slow loading

Generally, a blog that takes more than 8-10 seconds to completely load is considered slow. Your blog could be great but if it takes 20+ seconds to fully show up in a browser, very few people will ever get to read your content, no matter how great it is. One of the main problem that perpetuates this problem is that the blog owner is usually completely unaware of the issue. Because they usually spend a lot of time on their own blog, it seems to load quickly for them since it is cached in their browser. To make your blog load faster:

• Less pictures

• Upload and Optimize your pictures

• YouTube videos, plugins, widgets, music autoplay, ads…

2. Poor design

Ask yourself: What do you do when you land on an amateurish-looking website? A poorly designed blog is one of the fastest way to lose readers before they even click on any of your content. May it be poor choice of colors, nearly unreadable text, poor navigation or a dysfunctional template, most people will not stick very long if your blog doesn’t look right. If you are blogging on, at least, a semi-serious basis, your blog needs to look as professional as possible for people to take you seriously.

• Get a Logo

• Unaesthetic template

• No Pictures

3. No comments

One of the quickest way of checking whether a blog is active, popular and interesting is to gauge the number of comments. A lack of comments is usually a reliable indicator that I shouldn’t stay very long on your blog. I realize this is going to be controversial but let’s face it, for one reason or another, people are not leaving comments. It is the loyal readers that keeps a blog going, not the hundreds of empty hits that come and go without reading your content or interacting with you. Simply because of human nature, blogs with some semblance of a community are much more likely to see repeat visits. Finally, blog owners absolutely love to get comments! Here are the main reasons a blog doesn’t get comments:

• You are not responding to comments

• No participation in the wider community

• Uninteresting content

• You are making it too hard

• You are not asking for comments

I hope you enjoyed these blogging tips! What are some of the things that make you leave a blog nearly immediately? Is it slow loading? Grammar and spelling issues? Let us know in the comments.

Castor is the author of the movie blog Anomalous Material and can be contacted at castor[at]anomalousmaterial.com.