The Number One Reason People Leave Your Blog/Site

Even though there is a multitude of reasons why people are likely to leave your site without clicking through to other articles, taking action and subscribing to your feed, I want to take a stab at it and sum all of them into one main reason.

Whenever I visit sites, there are often times where I question the reasons why the blog author has done what he or she has and why they wan me to immediately leave their site. It is impossible to determine their reason, but these problems continue to exist with bloggers who don’t think about their readers and visitors who are visiting for the first time.

In general, it is the fact that you aren’t appealing to what the visitors want.

What Makes Up This Main Reason

Despite the fact that I said there was only reason, the sub-reasons all factor into the one main reason.

1. Ads – A major problem that many bloggers have is balancing the right number of ads on their site. Generally, they have too many, and this detracts from the value of your blog.
2. No Engagement Methods – Some blogs don’t even have the ability to comment on them (it may be turned off completely or on popular posts). The best advice that I can give is to focus solely on engaging your readers, through invitations to respond to what they think, to polls, to other plugins that might make them more likely to stick around.
3. No New Content – Seeing that there is no new content will make visitors leave, unless of course it is the first time visiting your site and you previously had something interesting to read about.
4. No Focus – The focus that your blog has is important. When you can’t differentiate your blog from a news site that covers thousands of topics, there is a problem, unless you are trying to become an all-in-one news site.
5. Too Much Content – When visitors can’t find what they are looking for easily, they tend to leave more often than sticking around and hoping that they can find it.
6. No Call to Action – Unless you inform your readers that you want them to subscribe, there is really no reason for them to look for a subscribe button, especially if it isn’t in their browser address bar.
7. Brief Content – Even though content can be overwhelming, you have to be aware that “brief” content doesn’t provide much value, either.
8. No Reason to Come Back – If your visitors don’t see new content, they will be more inclined to leave, which in turn also leads to a decrease in return traffic, from people who may have bookmarked or subscribed to your blog.

How to Combat This Problem

In the past, I have stated that you shouldn’t always listen to your visitors since they aren’t technically running your blog, but if you are unable to capture your audience, you should start listening up. They are the ones that will ultimately help you grow, increasing traffic, subscribers, and profit as time progresses. All of these factors ultimately come into play as you run your blog, and unless you do it properly, your bounce rate and conversion rate for visitors to subscribers probably won’t see any major increase.