Where do People Click on a Blog?
Sorry for the loooooooooong picture here, but I thought I’d share this with you folks. What parts of a blog are key to people interacting more with your site? Here are a 1,000 visits to my site and where people clicked. I thought it was pretty interesting!
At a 10,000 foot view, it’s apparent that it’s the conversation and my weighing in on those topics is that which brings the most attention on my blog. Visitors want to know what people are saying on my blog and why my voice is important. This isn’t surprising to me – but should be a lesson to those corporations that are developing clogs (corporate marketing sites that masquerade as ‘blogs’ with spin and no user generated content… i.e. comments).
It’s about the conversation and who you are!
What’s Hot:
- Comments – especially my Posts with the most Comments!
- About Me – reading a post isn’t enough, people want to know who I am and why they shoudl listen to me.
- Contact Me – people want to know I’m real. I write back, too!
- Blogs I read – maybe if they like me, they want to know where I’m getting my info.
- Projects – projects? Sounds cool, I wonder what he works on.
What’s Not:
- Archive – a month and a year are meaningless to me.
- Books I read – books? That’s so 20th century.
Surprises:
- Tag Cloud – cloud is a cool word, I wonder what a tag cloud is. Oh… that’s what he writes about.
Crazy Egg has a free account where you can measure the interaction on a thousand visits to a page. They have a couple different flavors of reports as well, the heat map and the confetti map. The confetti map shows actual click locations and density while the heat map aggregates the activity. Be sure to visit the Crazy Egg blog for some additional information!
If you like this technology, you can install a similar heat map tool (very watered down) on your own server with ClickHeat (PHP).
