So, how you do separate yourself from the pack? This fifth post, of a series called Wpdesigner Weekend Must Do (WWMD), will help you rise above the rest to make a more memorable first impression.

No Feedburner Chicklet - The Feedburner Chicklet, used to display your number of blog subscribers, is useful for attracting more readers, but browse enough blogs and you’ll begin to see why you really should remove it. Instead of an ugly little button to display your number of subscribers, opt for a text-based display of that number or completely do away with displaying your subscribers count. Try harder, don’t just slap a Feedburner Chicklet on your blog.

No Right Sidebars - I should practice what I preach, but I’m perfectly fine with my own right sidebar at this moment. But for you, if you have a small sidebar, consider moving it to the left. Someone should really run a test to find out the average number of blogs that use right sidebars.

Fluid / Elastic Width - Currently, only the unusually diligent developers have the patience to create a fluid or elastic design for their blogs - designs that fit in any resolution. Typically, if you take this route, you will instantly improve your readers’ browsing experience.

Irregular Advertisement Formats - Just because they’re advertisments, it doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with them. Don’t go for the boring 125×125 button banners like everyone else is doing. Using irregular ads sizes or formats will help you look unique. It’ll also help your sponsors get more clicks because irregular formats tend to yield better results.

Now you’re armed with four new ideas. Have fun tweaking your blog this weekend.

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How does deleting categories benefit you? Plain and simple, your blog needs to stick to its niche, focused on its main topic(s), so your list of categories need to reflect that. A short list of categories makes it easier for wandering visitors to determine what your blog is about, just like the title, blog description, main navigation links, and etc.

Regardless of what it’s about, your blog needs to look the part, say the part, and most importantly be the part. Every little thing reinforces the fact that your blog is bout a certain niche. The more you make it clear that your blog is about a certain niche, the more likely visitors will come back for it.

While narrowing down my own set of categories, it was clear to me that I was wandering away from what my blog is about, WordPress themes. Instead of ignoring miscellaneous categories with few posts that didn’t have much to do with WordPress or WordPress themes, I moved the posts under those categories to the Uncategorized category and deleted the now empty miscellaneous categories.

Another benefit from shortening your category list is spotting your strengths. For some blogs, it’s easy to see what their strengths are. For example, you can clearly tell that Wpdesigner’s strengths are WordPress Themes and Tutorials. For some other blogs, it isn’t so easy to determine. Deleting miscellaneous categories will help you determine your strengths.

So, go through your blog to determine whether you need to re-focus and get back on track. If you can, delete miscellaneous categories.

Have a great weekend!

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Let’s say you’ve paid $100 to get 400 new visitors to your blog and 200 of them left without doing anything. How do you feel about that? Even if you’re getting free traffic, you should be worrying about reducing your bounce rate. You could be losing those visitors forever.

What is a bounce rate?

Basically, if your blog has a 50% bounce rate then it means 1 out of 2 people left your blog without visiting another page. Yes, they simply left without clicking on one single link.

By the way, anything higher than zero percent is unacceptable. You should always work on reducing the bounce rate.

How do you reduce the bounce rate?

First, let me share my bounce rate statistics.

• July: 52.10%
• August: 50.17%
• September: 48.36% (so far)

Since July, Wpdesigner’s bounce rate went down 3.74 percent. So now you know, it’s possible. Keep reading to find out how I’m doing it.

Before you can reduce it, you need to know what affects it. The main factor is targeted traffic. If you’re not getting targeted traffic then people are leaving your blog because it isn’t relevant to what they’ve searched for.

Targeted traffic alone depends on several factors. But basically, it’s going to be hard to get targeted traffic if your blog covers a wide range of topics.

If your blog doesn’t cover many topics at all and you’ve done a good job with sticking to your niche then maybe you need to:

• make it look the part. How do you feel about a technology blog looking like a food blog?
• sprinkle your keywords throughout your blog, in the blog title, description, post titles, content, categories, and sidebar titles.
• get other blogs to link to you using the keywords that you want them to use.

There are many other factors that can affect your bounce rate. For examples: Is your blog’s too text or graphic heavy? Do you run pop-up ads? Is your best content visible?

Other ways to reduce bounce rate

Design wise, you should make sure your blog is balanced, if not well-balanced. Most of the times, blogs are text heavy. Text heavy pages don’t capture the visitors’ attention and that’s a problem.

To the left of this paragraph is a side-by-side comparison of the before and after of Wpdesigner. If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been adding a relevant image to each new blog post. You should do the same. On the other hand, I’m aware that not every blog design or WordPress theme allows room for an image with every post on the front page.

That’s okay, but you’ll need to make sure that your design or WordPress theme has enough graphics and / or icons to balance out your text heavy front page.

Beside using more images in the blog posts, I’ve also redesigned Wpdesigner to put the best content forward.

Ideally, you should optimize every single page of your blog to reduce the overall bounce rate. But for this weekend, focus on the front page.

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For this week’s WWMD, it’s very simple. Get me to review your blog. It’s free! And, getting someone, other than yourself, to review your blog is probably the best thing you can do to improve it. Go to the Wpdesigner forums; register for an account; wait for the email to activate your account; login and start a new topic under “Ask Small Potato” Reviews to make your review request.

If you have specific questions, be sure to include them. It’s best to go beyond making a general review request.

From design and speed, to SEO (search engine optimization) and making more room for your blog’s most popular content, I’ll give you the full break-down of your blog. Note: You should make review requests for blogs using unique themes only. I will not review blogs using free WordPress themes.

It’s first come first servered so don’t wait. Take advantage of this free review service!

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Your first Wpdesigner-Weekend-Must-Do task is to review your installed plugins and uninstall the unnecessary ones to improve your blog’s performance.

For this blog, I’ve uninstalled the WP Download Monitor plugin, which I used to track how many times my themes and other files have been downloaded. Why did I uninstalled such a useful plugin? I didn’t need it and it was putting stress on my server, simple as that.

If you want a more complicated explanation, here it is; the WP Download Monitor plugin was making too many queries to the database. The more queries your blog makes, the more stress your server (web host) has to endure. In extreme cases like surviving a Digg-effect or a huge sudden increase in traffic, your host could shut down your blog for putting too much stress on the server, even if you haven’t used up the storage and bandwidth resources.

With the WP Download Monitor plugin, the front page of my blog had to operate with 136 queries on every page load. After uninstalling that plugin, the front page needed only 10 queries to work. 136 versus 10 and all I have to do is give up tracking the downloads, hmmm.. oh what, oh what should I do? I deactivated / uninstalled it, of course.

To find out how many queries your blog is making on each page load:

• Add
  <!– <?php echo get_num_queries(); ?> queries –>

  to your theme’s footer.php file.

• Upload the new footer.php file to your theme’s folder.
• Go back to your blog’s front page.
• On your browser, go to View > Page Source.
• Scroll to the bottom to find the number of queries.

The image below is an example of what you’ll see:

Before you start uninstalling or deactivating each plugin to find out how many queries each one makes and to find out which plugin to uninstall for sure, back up your blog’s database and files, just in case you mess up.

Now that you know what you must do for the first WWMD, once you’re finished, come back to this post to write a comment. Let me know how it turned out for you and how I can help you with the next WWMD.

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