So, a while back I was concerned about the huge number of people on BifSniff Cartoons who only stayed for 0-30seconds. It was consistently up over 80% going as high as 86%...

I looked around some stats of sites and blogs that have open stats... can't remember which ones now, but BoingBoing was one.. anyway all the research was somewhat comforting - they were all really high for the 0-30 second visitors.

If you look at Boing Boing stats even now, at time of writing it's currently 78.4%

Comforted, but still not happy, I made some simple changes to the site to try to keep people longer - one major change was the '5 things to do' on the homepage. I realised our home page was very passive so I put some simple links to stuff on the homepage to engage people...

Anyway, it's hard to judge cause and effect, because there was other stuff happening at the time, but since the changes we're down to 68/69% for the 0-30s.

I have some other vague long term plans for further stickiness, because I want to see that number reduced even more... I want people hanging around longer and getting to know us better!

In the long term we hope to develop some interactive BifSniff stuff and the like, but any further short term stuff we can do I'd love to hear about it.

Anyone want to share ideas, or share stats, or just discuss in general?

Frank - are those stats filtered to exclude robots?

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Now that's a good question...
I haven't a clue! Nor do I know how to configure them

Also, something else which might affect the visit times is feed readers, would they count as robots?

That depends.. Are you using your own feed or are you passing it through feedburner?

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I don't use feedburner.

I'm sick to my teeth of third party solutions like that... I know it gives good stats etc, but... meh. Where does it all end? :P

I really like feedburner, as it offers some very nice ways of promoting the content, but you are entitled to your opinion.

With regard to "stickiness" I suppose the key thing is to give people a reason to come back. For example, on a blog, if you accept comments then using the "subscribe to comments" plugin definitely works, as you will find people coming back time and time again to post their views and followup on other people's comments.

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Subscribe to comments is a feature I love... however, it's not a feature supported on Blogger...

BifSniff, at some point in the future will move to Wordpress, but it's too big a job to undertake for the momento.

Blogger sucks, and I know it. Again, part of it is the horrible reliance on a third party for functionality which I'm sick of.

I know feedburner has nice features etc, and I may relent and use it eventually but I'm being obstinate right now. Mind you, I'm not the only one, for example Robert Scoble seems to share my POV (see comments).

Moving from Blogger to Wordpress is relatively easy. It doesn't even take that much time to do

If you are concerned about getting people to stick around on your site, then making the move is probably worth the investment of time

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The move for BifSniff is complicated by the fact that I wish to retain the current structure. I am working on a combination of design and plugins to achieve this, but the research isn't finished yet...

When it is there's a couple of days work in it I'd say. Given that currently there is no cash in BifSniff, paid work has to take priority...

But it will happen.

Of course

You have to eat, pay bills etc.,

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