How I got my bounce rate from 80 to 30?

Most of my blogs traffic comes from social media sites, forums and other blogs through comments, and as you all know such traffic is mostly not targeted and thus, reducing conversions. Other than this my biggest problem until recently was that my bounce rate was 80%, it took a lot of work to reduce this bounce rate to 30%. My traffic comes from the same sources and my search engine traffic didn't change, but I still succeeded in reducing my bounce rate using some simple on-site strategies, I have mentioned some of these in my previous articles for different purposes,

First of all, bounce rate is the percentage of your visitors who leave immediately without checking other pages or spending any time on your site. This is does not allow you to efficiently monetize your site, as such visitors will not increase conversions. Bounce is usually calculated with one common formula, Bounce rate = Total number of visits viewing one page / Total number of visits.

Interlinking posts
I have mentioned two to three times about this in my previous posts. Interlinking of posts has many uses, one of them includes decreasing your bounce rate. This works best when you do it with links inside your content, as it increases curiosity in the reader. The key here is to write attractive text links to grab user attention and manage to create an extra page view. Interlinking of posts also helps in your seo, it played a key role in getting my blog to PR4. I implemented this strategy one month ago, and the results were quite surprising. Just two days after I started to interlink all my posts my bounce rate started to steadily decrease. The reason why this works is that its of great value to your users. This is one of the main reasons why sites like Wikipedia rank so high and are so popular, i think Wikipedia has less than 2 percent bounce rate. (To learn more visit : Benefits of interlinking posts)

Include related, popular and latest posts sections
This is one more thing that is very effective, if a visitor doesn't get his needs fulfilled, he has a list of other articles on that topic in your blog itself. This works very well if you have a wide collection of similar articles. There are many widgets for both blogger and wordpress to automate this process. The most popular post sections lets the your visitor get a feel of your blogs content. All of these also comes under the interlinking section, but this has a bit less effect on it.

Get related links, avoid social media
As I have mentioned above, my blog gets most of its traffic from social media sites like Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, reddit and also through blog commenting, but even though I get a lot of visitors none of my them from such sources stayed longer than 20 seconds, neither did they visit the second page. This is very common for any blog, but you can cure this by placing links on related sites, promoting your blog on related social media sites. My traffic from Digg leads to very less conversions, but the traffic i get from Sphinn which is of my niche leads to good conversions and reduces my bounce rate.

Divide long posts into two or more
I did not use this method, but people who have, told its effectiveness. Many sites containing tutorials
are divided into different pages for topics. It is widely observed that such sites have a low bounce rate. This is because as in a normal post no one would have the curiosity to check out out other topics they would be interested in, besides long posts are very boring and if I come across a long post I would hardly read the first two paragraphs, but if its divided into two or three more I would definitely take my time, take breaks and finish it. This is all just games for the human mind, its up to you to twist and tweak to suit your visitors.

Usability and stickiness
When someone visits your site the first thing they see would be your design and style. The human mind plays a crazy game, you'll have to fool it, to increase conversions. I have seen many sites with good enough content, but really great design, sticky posts, which are all interlinked. Stickiness actually means to hold attention of a visitor towards your content and increase the time he/she spends on your site. There are a set of plugins and widgets which are used to increase stickiness, most of them are related, popular and latest posts plugins, but somethings which work best is simple changes in your theme and some simple designs sch as borders and linings.

Conclusion
As I mentioned above, this all depends on your visitors mind, your goal is to seem attractive to his/her mind. These are just small tips I have mentioned here, you can make maximum use of it by experimenting with some tips and tricks. I will be writing more on this topic in the coming weeks, to stay updated please subscribe to my feed.