628 – Keep those visitors looking: Tom talks Time On Site

Episode 628 – Time On Site
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with Episode 628 of Screw the Commute podcast. We're talking about time on site or time on your website. See, the longer someone stays on your site, the more likely they will be to spend money with you. And the more the search engines think your site must be a pretty good site if people are staying on it for a long time. Now, this episode is going to give you a bunch of methods to keep people on your site longer. All right. Hope you didn't miss. Episode 627 This is another one of my many phone tip and phone automation things. There's a tip on here that I thought was a joke. I thought it was one of those idiot things to make you look stupid, but it's real. You won't believe what you can do to pound on your hear your phone and make it do stuff. I couldn't believe it, but it's absolutely true. That was episode 627 and I got to keep talking about Episode six, 24, 625 and 626. That was plug in week where if you just listen to those three episodes, you will know more about the inner workings of your website than 90% of the Web designers out there. And why would you want to if your site looks pretty, you're good, right? No, that's crazy to think like that.

[00:01:49] You're negligent to your business. If you think like that, your site can get hacked because you didn't do certain things behind the scenes. You got bloated, you got multiple. This one site had 54 plug ins, three or four or five or six of them were duplicates and just slowed the site down. And and you're susceptible to people using your site in the background to spam emails to millions of people through your server. I mean, so if you ignore this, God help you. Don't call me up in the middle of the night to help save you when you get hacked. All right. So that was episode six, 24, 625 and 626. And to get to a back episode, you go screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode number screwthecommute.com/624. So do that. And then like I said, phone tips was 627 and today time on site is 628. Oh, that's enough of a soapbox for me. I just get so excited. Not excited but mad because people ignore this and we critique their websites and they say, oh, my site is really nice and my web designer is really smart. No, you just don't know what you're doing. And your site might look halfway decent, but that's only half the battle. If you get hacked or any of these other bad things happen to you, it's your fault because it can.

[00:03:16] You just listen to those three episodes. It takes you an hour and a half or so, and you won't let these things happen to your site. All right. I'm just so fired up about. All right, so make sure you grab a copy of our automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and pick up a copy of our podcast app while you're at it at screwthecommute.com/app. So you can it does all kinds of cool stuff on your cell phone and tablet for you. All right. Let's get into the main event. And I got a first tell you, sometimes you don't really want people staying on your site, okay? Like sometimes I want to send them to a sales letter and have them click over and buy the product. And and I'd trade them clicking through to my shopping cart and spending money any day of the week rather than just building up time on my site numbers. Because if they never buy anything, guess what? It really doesn't matter how long people stay on your site. But at any rate, you are better off if having them there longer because they're more likely to spend money or hire you for whatever you do. And that's what this episode is all about. All right. Now, if your site is full of dense text, people will bounce instantly. The site looks too hard to read and not very interesting. So you've got to pay attention to these two topics readability and usability, if you want any of the other techniques that I teach it to work.

[00:04:58] Even have a chance of working. See people get headaches and eyestrain from looking at screens too long. So anything you do to make it easier for them to see your site without strain is to your benefit and to their benefit. I mean, I've done entire episodes on both those topics readability and usability, and I highly suggest, before you implement any of these other things, I'm going to teach you today that you go back and review those and look at your site with a critical eye and fix the things. Because if it's not readable that easily and if it's not usable that easy and things that, you know, since you're involved in it, you wouldn't notice as compared to a new visitor, then you're not going to have success with people staying on your site. So anyway, readability was episode 312 and usability was Episode 313. The reason they're entire episodes for each one of those is because there's a lot of details. None of it's hard, but it's stuff you probably never thought about. So screwthecommute.com/312 for readability and screwthecommute.com/313 for usability. So that's where you start. Make sure you have done everything properly on those episodes and it's going to pay off greatly for you, I'm telling. All right, let's get into some things you can do that will automatically keep people on your site longer.

[00:06:30] One of the main things is video. If people watch even a two minute video on your site, that's more than twice as long than the average visitor stays on a site. Now, time on site, which is what we're talking about here, covers wide ranges based on your industry, whether your business to consumer, business to business. And what I'm going to read you next is comes from a site called klipfolio.com in their metric headquarters metric HQ. So this is a quote from them. A good benchmark for average time on a page is 52 seconds across and that's across multiple industries where they based their data from 20 billion, 20 billion user sessions. Now B to B websites have the highest average time on page, which is around 82 seconds, where just an average run of the mill across industry site is 52 seconds. But it says a good average time on page depends on many factors, including the type of device the person is on the industry and the target audience. Now I put a link in there where they have a whole bunch of graphs on different industries and average times on site. And so your goal is to beat these averages and beat them really bad, right? Because if you do a good job of what I teach in this episode, you could do ten, 20, 30 times the average by using these techniques.

[00:08:07] All right. Anyway, back to videos. Now, one thing I've said on many other episodes that I really want to emphasize again here is we love YouTube. We love YouTube. However. We love YouTube for one specific reason, and that is to catch people all the hundreds of millions of people that go to YouTube. We want to catch our share of them and funnel them like you throw away, throw around the word funnel that much. But and anyway, send them to your website on a one way ticket, right to your website. See if you get lazy and your web people get lazy and they just take the what we call the embed code from YouTube. So that means you can just put a piece of code in and your YouTube video will show up on your website and you think, Oh, isn't that so great? That's easy, right? Let YouTube do all the heavy lifting of these big files and everything. Well, yeah, that might sound good on the surface, but that's the lazy way to do it, and it doesn't help you in the long run. And here's why. When YouTube allows you to do this, they're always going to make it easy for people to go back to YouTube and forget about you. We don't want that. We want to grab people off of YouTube, shovel them into your site, and then if they're watching a video on your site, we don't want to use it as a YouTube video.

[00:09:45] We want to use a raw video that's hosted somewhere else other than your website. Now, let's talk about this a little bit. See, video files are really large. And so if you just lumped a whole bunch of videos on your cheap shared hosting account for that, you pay five or $10 a month for whatever it is, 15. Your site's going to use the native calendar to load. It's going to load really slow. You're going to use up all your data. You're going to crash the thing. You know that the video is going to stutter and not play. If you get a lot of views you can't have, that makes you look stupid and you're good. You might get a big bill for overages on on data and all that stuff. So, no, you don't want that. What you do is you host the actual video file over on, let's say Amazon SX three, which is dirt cheap. I'm talking pennies for superior high quality hosting for large files and then you connect it to a player on your website that the visitor who's watching the video has no idea or cares where it's being hosted. They just want it to play. And so the player that you use is not going to send them back to YouTube after you got them from YouTube. It's going to keep them on your website, which is what this freaking episode is about, right? Keeping them on your website and increasing your time on site because you look great to all the search engines.

[00:11:23] When people stay on your site, what you're doing is just sending the message to the search engines that they know all see all their like The Wizard of Oz. That, Hey, this must be a pretty good site because people were staying on it for three, four or five, ten, 15, 20 minutes or more. All right. Which is, you know, 20 times the average say so. So videos are great, but that's the best practice. Yes, you can embed a YouTube video, but the the threat is and it's very real threat. They're going to just click on the YouTube player back to YouTube and forget about you. You don't want that. Okay, so that's video. Now, here's another simple thing you can do to keep people on your site is make sure your site has a plug in, or does it automatically to add links to related articles or videos to help your site do this, you should properly categorize your content and add tags to tell what the content is about so that the related plugin knows what content to grab based on what the person is looking at currently. Because you don't want to give somebody reading an article on X on your site and you send them to some really crazy thing that's unrelated, like Y and they leave. But if you send them to something's related to what they're looking at now, they're more likely to stay and read or watch that video or read that article or that blog posting or whatever you got.

[00:13:03] So basically the related feature is going to make is going to help show people other content that's based on the content they're now consuming. And this keeps them on your site long. All right. Now, similar to automatic related content being shown to visitors, you can manually link pages in your site together whenever it makes sense. So let's say you have an article like I do on one of my sites. It's called Is College Really Worth It? You know, I'm promoting my school, which, you know, in six months you can have a career and make a lot of money and not have any debt or very little debt compared to a four year college where you're out of the workforce for four years, which is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And then you're working at Starbucks when you get out because you have no skills. So anyway, you can see I'm a little bit biased here. So anyway, in that article, is college really worth it? I can link to a quiz called Do You Know the seven college rip offs? See, so it's related to the first article because it's about kids in college and there you go, see. So that's what we're talking about is manually linking to other stuff in the midst of your article or your blog posting or or whatever or in the, the text underneath your videos and things like that.

[00:14:30] So when someone, let's say, is reading your content, you should be looking out for places in that content where you can link to other related content on your site. So typically what happens, people will finish reading the current post and then go back to click on the links to go to deeper info on the related topics. Now sometimes they'll stop at that link and go. Doesn't really matter as long as they're staying on your site, say, and they're getting the things that they're most interested in. You don't really care if they read the whole article and then click the link to the other article. It doesn't make any difference which is best for your which happens most on your site. It doesn't matter at all. It just matters. They're staying with your stuff. All right. Next thing is to make your content comment worthy and encourage people to comment. I know I've spent tons of time reading comments on sites, even though I didn't leave a comment myself. Now all this falls under the umbrella of the term engagement, which all the billion dollar social media companies live for. So why not? You engage with people, get them engaging with each other on your site, and they'll stay there longer. Now, so I'm going to throw in a couple of ways that you can increase your comments and maybe I'll do an entire episode on this pretty soon.

[00:15:58] First, make sure you respond to any comments quickly. See, virtually every comment area anywhere will allow you to get notices of the comment if it's your site, even if you're mentioned on social media. You get notice a lot of times. If you want notice from those things. So make sure that you respond quickly to any comments that keeps people engaged. Because if they comment and you never respond, well, they think, why should I bother commenting on this site? And they disappear and leave and don't come back. If if you've responded to them, they come back and read it. And other people have they start reading other comments. And again, we're making them stay on your site longer. Now another thing you can do is start comment battles and these can be friendly or they can be deadly serious. So an example for friendly would be you could say something like, well, what are the best pets? Or Is a ferret better a better pet than a rabbit? There's something like that, see? So nobody's probably going to get real vicious about that, that topic. Okay. Unless, I don't know, ferrets have been canceled for saying something wrong or I don't know. Now, more serious one would be something like this Should people be allowed to to own high capacity magazines? Now you might get a really big fight going. Now, either one of these should get people commenting, which in turn keeps them on your site longer.

[00:17:38] So that's all we're talking about. I'm not making any political comments here. I'm just saying these are techniques. If you get people arguing, they'll stay on your site longer. If you get people just friendly back and forth on what they like better, Fords versus Chevys or, you know, whatever. Another thing you can do is add success stories and before and after pictures. People love these and they're powerful motivators. And of course, they keep people on your site longer. You can use content upgrades. In other words, give people something extra special for doing something like leaving a comment or opting in for something. These are they stay on your site for this, especially if what they get, they have to come back to a hidden page on your site to get. The other thing is gamification. This is a way to keep people on your site for a long time. You can have online puzzles. You can even have custom games created that promote your business while the person is playing the game on your site. Pretty cool, huh? Now, this was by no means a comprehensive list of things you could do to keep people on your site, but doing even a few of them can have a drastic effect on your bottom line and the amount of time people spend on your site. So bottom line here is to do things that keep people on your site.

[00:19:05] You'll most likely make more money. And Google and the other search engines will give you a higher ranking that's bringing in more people that stay on your site longer. And that's how you grow. A website doesn't happen overnight, usually. And whatever you grow it to is probably going to be better than what it is if you just leave it alone and don't do this time on site stuff. So if you want to help learn how to do all this stuff and the other thousand things you need to know to be successful online, check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com. It's the longest running, most successful, most unique ever in the field of Internet and digital marketing. And I triple dog dare anybody to put a program up against mine and nobody will do it because they'll be embarrassed. I can tell you I'm all for you, the small business owner or the person that wants to be in a small business. And I've sacrificed pretty much my whole adult life for this. I could have quit doing this 22 years ago when I hit Multi Millionaire Status and I didn't. I stuck with it because I just love to see these all these entrepreneurs growing their business and and really living the lifestyle that they want. All right. That's my story. And I'm sticking to it. Go out there and get people to stay on your darn site and I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.