Taming Bounce Rate

Many bloggers are concerned over their bounce rate.  The bounce rate refers to a visitor landing on your blog then leaving without clicking any links or staying long enough to read.  In short visitors are mearly hitting and running.  The greater number of visitors to your blog that stay under 30 seconds the higher your bounce rate.  As a blogger I care about my bounce rate for a couple of reasons.  A high bounce rate is a negative thing when it comes to Page Rank (PR) and other blog ranking systems.  To me a high bounce rate also means a high loss of potential readers and subscribers.  I have found the following tricks to help reduce my bounce rate:

• blog ad networks - Some methods of blog promotion such as Entrecard where members are encouraged to click a large number of sites daily will increase bounce rate.  As soon as I stopped participating in Entrecard my bounce rate decreased across all of my blogs I had in their system.  Blog advertising networks like Adgitize and CMFAds that put more emphasis on other type of participation with lower clicking rates have less of a negative impact on bounce rate.
• traffic exchanges - A good manual traffic exchange can actually lower your bounce rate.  The reason for this is three fold.  Interesting content catches the member's attention so they stop to read a bit.  Second members tend to do their traffic exchange clicks in small chunks of time pausing on the last clicked site until they have the next chunk of time to do more clicking.  That means they could have your blog open for several hours at a time.  Finally a traffic exchange take your blog promotion to a larger audience than just the blogosphere.  Reaching a broader audience increases the chance of getting attention from others interested in reading what you have to say. [Note: Do not use a traffic exchange if using Adsense!]
• interactive content - Adding interactive content (eg. polls, games, contests, live chat, comments) to your blog is an effective way to reduce bounce rate. 
• FYI section - I added an FYI section to my cooking blog right under the welcome message.  Basically what I do is as I find a tid bit of information I think my readers will find interesting or if I want to point out something I did to improve my blog I put it in point form with the date in this section.  I usually have three or less points in the section at a time.  Not only has this decreased my bounce rate it has resulted in an increase in return visitors.
• most popular posts - I added a most popular posts section on my cooking blog.  This gives readers a chance to check out these posts if they are interested.
• LinkWithin - This script adds a thumnail and link to three other similar posts to the bottom of each post you make.  This is an effect way to reduce bounce rate but giving the reader a visual of other posts they may find interesting.

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