8 features of a highly sticky blog post

From the beginning of my blogging career one thing I belief which I was right about was creating a sticky blog, but still I really didn’t know the exact meaning of stickiness, like most people today I believed that a blog can be called as sticky based upon its design, but I recently found out what really a sticky blog is, its the readability and usability of a blog.

Certain aspects of a blog such as bounce rate, pageview’s and avg time which are crucial for making money depend upon the stickiness of your blog. As I mentioned above, stickiness has no relations with your blogs design, its your blog posts which have to be optimized. I could never find the exact definition of sticky blogs, but the meaning is pretty clear, its something which causes an attraction to a particular blog post and keeps the reader interested till the end. In this post I’ve managed to compile everything that would make your post look attractive to your readers.

The title of the post

Many of our forefathers have said never to judge a book by its cover, but I think these are a few human instincts which is unavoidable, and for us bloggers this is one of the best way to take advantage of our readers. Whenever I come across an attractive title I can never resist visiting the post even if I’m not in need of it.

I once used to be very bad at this, but after reading blogs such as DoshDosh and Howtomakemyblog, I got the touch of choosing attractive titles and very soon I had mastered it. The most attractive titles include lists and case studies, but looking at my experience, small blogs usually do well if the titles seem like personal recommendations.

Maybe this is because people expect blogs to be more like personal diaries instead of just guides, your content inside doesn’t matter, but your title must not sound like a guide. For example, instead of ‘How to take your blog viral of Stumbleupon’ I’d write ‘How I generated 20000 visitors from Stumbleupon’. I’m sure most of you would find the second one attractive.

The font of text – stay simple but unique

The one thing which your readers value most is your writing, so as a blogger you’ll have to make as clear and attractive as possible. The usual times new roman or ariel which are used in most blogs aren’t bad, they are clear and readable, but it doesn’t seem attractive as we read the same format everywhere online and offline, I’m sure all of you are confused, so I have to clear this with an example.

Many of you would definitely have heard about Smartbloggerz which has become very popular in the past couple of days and I happen to be a great fan of this blog. Recently Sushant, the owner of this blog changed the font of all the text there, overnight the blog seemed really different and it felt as though the entire look of the blog had changed. I failed to figure out the font he had used, but I figured out one thing that his old one and the commonly used Times New Roman was better than this.

But still everyone loved this new font mainly because it seemed pretty good to the eyes as most of us were used to the old one, and I actually felt much more interested in reading his content, such things can change your mind, I mean it can make you read even when you don’t want to, this is a unique psychological feeling which I have no explanation for, but believe me it works when it comes to increasing stickiness.

Interlinking new posts with old posts

I have recommended this in many of my posts in the past, but I myself am not able to do this due to lack of time. When I used to do this my bounce rate never went beyond 30%, but now its almost touched 70%. I saw instant change in my bounce rate when I was interlinking posts and it surely improved user experience, they usually left my site only after a few clicks here and there, so this means an increase in stickiness.

Other than this there are many other benefits of interlinking blog posts, some include SEO, increased ad impressions and higher rankings in Alexa and Compete, but the main benefit is anyway a sticky blog post. I have seen many blogs which interlink posts, but only 2 or 3 links in each post, this is literally of no use.

Wikipedia is on of the most popular sites on the internet and at the same time the most stickiest, I can tell this because most of the people stick to it atleast for 5 minutes before they leave, the main reason is each and every article is interlinked with hundreds of others. You’ll find instant award winning success if you can do atleast near to this volume.

Highlighting important facts – making it easier to understand

Like all other readers I never feel comfortable or get the time to read through an entire post and I bet most of your readers are like this as well. So if they fail to see the most important part of the post, then your entire hard work will be ruined. Moreover your readers will prefer reading your posts more than other blogs because you make it easy for them.

They won’t openly admire this concept of yours and very few would feel the benefit of doing this, but in the long run if any reader of yours is asked to choose which blog he likes on your competitors and you, then I’m sure that the answer will your blog. There are many ways to highlight, the best way is to bolden it, or maybe even use italics on a particular keyword. Some blogs even use colors for this purpose, but for most this will look bad on your interface.

Their are a certain rules for this, you may loose your blogs looks if you overdo this, its supposed to be only for a few facts and some other stuffs you don’t want your readers to miss. I usually do this when I’m showing a particular stat or number in any of my posts and at times I even highlight links.

Write like being a human

If you’ve read grammar in English I’m sure you would have read about the different persons in speexh, which is first second and third person. This has a great influence on your readers and it somehow motivates them to keep reading. The main purpose of a blog was to be a man’s virtual diary which speaks about something he does as he would tell it on his own.

Thats why I recommend affiliate marketers to use the word ‘You’ and personally refer to the reader. This is speaking as the first and second person. You can see the below example and judge for yourself on which one of these has a bigger impact on your mind,

1. Get this software for an amazing 50% off and also get double the worth bonuses for free
2. Hey! If you buy this software today your sure to get an amazing 50% off and you also stand a chance of getting bonuses for free which are double the price.

Putting up the word ‘You’ creates a feeling in the reader which makes him closer to you as he would feel that its you who are speaking out to him. This has no standards to measure success, but I feel that readers will stick around for a longer time.

Related posts

Another way to interlink new posts with the old ones is with the help showing links to other posts related to the current post, if you have a huge volume of articles, then this is sure to increase your stickiness. Your readers will be forced to see what else you have in store for them in other posts on this topic.

This is usually the best way to send traffic to your old posts as your links in between posts will not contain the exact title of the post, this may result in increased bounce rate.

There are many more plugins and widgets available for this and many more ways such as popular and recent posts, but the best still remains related posts. This is still a very simple system but very effective when it comes to blog stickiness.

Images – a crucial element for a sticky blog

I have seen many blog posts which contain great content and most have followed all of the above methods, but if I remove their images used in those posts, the post is not as attractive as it once used to be. This too is a strange activity of the human brain, most of those images aren’t even related to the post, but somehow it adds a special effect to it.

So the images don’t have to be directly related to the content you write, but must be of high quality and of a bit lower intensity. So if I write a post about website traffic I’ll put an image of a road filled with vehicles, its of no use, but makes your post look really attractive.

I usually get my images from Flickr which has got a huge collection and I do give credit to those image owners in the end of my post. Just search for a similar keyword on Flickr and I’m sure you’ll find a hell lot of images related to your blog post. These images aren’t hard to judge, I’m sure anyone can find out what looks good on your blog.

Attractive color shades

From the past one year I have come across many sites which have awesome looks and I often felt depressed because I didn’t have the skills or money to design such a site, but in the past few months I have figured out that these designs are not really beautiful templates, they just look unique due to a few tweaks in their colors.

Most of these have been done with the help of 3 different color shades, one for headers, one for sub-headers and maybe another for links. Whatever style you use there isn’t an exact format for this, you just have to put your creativity to the test and test out different designs.

If you could take a close look at the image above, you’ll notice the different color shades which makes this site look awesome and seems really sticky, but this just came out of a simple UBT template, this is the theme used by bloggingaccess. The tweaks in designs he has used here isn’t very tough to do, all you need is creativity and patience to test. If you can take a look at the right bottom of this image you’ll see an adsense unit, which I feel is a very well blended unit which I’ve seen in a long time and I’m sure he’ll have high click through rates of 2% to 3% with this.

On to our readers

Stickiness is one of the features of a blog which can not be analyzed, it is basically on the human judgement and whatever feels attractive to him, so there is no definition for it. If your repeat visits increase and your affiliate sales, then you can be sure that your blog’s getting stickier.

I’ll be glad to post more on this topic, if you have any suggestions, comments and questions please feel free to to use the comments section below and to to keep up with future posts on this topic follow me on Twitter and subscribe to my blog.

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