An attempt to lower the bounce rate

[Skolor]

I posted a little while ago about I was going to try and do a little something about the massive bounce rate Entrecard traffic incurs. The easiest solution, which I thought of while dropping, was to have all of my links direct to a contest I'm running each weekday for 200 ec.

Fairly simple. Showup, drop your card, post a comment on the contest page, and post a comment some place else on my blog. Every weekday, right after I make the daily post I'll go onto the contest page, check for comments, pick one, make sure they made a comment some place on the blog, and then delete them all. Whichever one I picked gets 200ec sent to them.

Check out my Entrecard Contest

[Skolor]

Not to mention they're a good faux-currency to use. Everyone who has a use for them makes them by hand, and understands how long 200 ec takes to make. It'll take a good hour to make, so most people say, oh hey, 200 ec is a lot. If I were to buy them they'd only be a dollar or two, which Isn't terribly much to spend on a contest, especially if it draws in a good bit of traffic.

[Skolor]

Well that was a flop. On my first day of offering it I managed to get two people to enter, neither of which followed the rules well enough to actually get the credits.

If anyone here would like to enter, please do, I would love the interest in it.

If this continues, I'm most likely going to have to change it. I'm thinking maybe I could change it to a weekly thing, giving out 600 ec to one person, 300ec to another, and 100 ec to a final winner.

Of course, the basis of my contest is usually "Amuse me and get paid" as to who actually wins, but hey, its something.

[Skolor]

Wow. This has been surprisingly successful, in part. I ended up not doing much online over the weekend, and lost some traffic due to that. However, up until that point the contest proved highly successful for driving and keeping traffic on my blog.

As a note, I've changed the rules, prizes are now given out on Monday only, but a total of over 1000 credits will be given out every Monday. It would be great for some of you guys to head over to my blog and check it out.

[voguesugar]

very interesting.

[Skolor]

Oh wow. I hadn't even thought about this post until I just got an email about it.

This contest is dead now, I haven't paid out in quite a while. However, the response was amazing while it was running, I could not believe it. So, I'm running it on my new site, with some extras.

1k EC a week, part 2.

[Aqeel]

Great strategy!

[Sock Yee]

Hey it's a great idea. Most of the time, people only drop cards for point and why not make them stay longer and come back for more using contests.

[legendary11]

that is a good way to reduce the bounce rate can kind of see the visitors reaction "hey this is nt what i was looking f . . . . . ooo a contest" :P 'reads on'

[Bloggeries]

I think if you want to lower the bounce rate you can do one of 2 things.

a) examine traffic is it mostly really easy to get traffic like stumble upon and other very un targeted sources? If so that might be it simply; get rid of the fluff and you have a great bounce rate.

or

b) Are you getting targeted traffic but poor bounce? Maybe your page turns your audience off. Setup a blog poll and ask your audience what they think or try and tweak stuff. If you tweak make 1 change at a time and let it run for a while to see if there is a dif. Change 2 much at a time and you won't be sure what exact change made the difference... Could be a combo who knows.