You have 10 seconds to engage a user.

From landing on your page, to clicking away, those 10 seconds will be spent mostly skimming your words. No matter how much time and effort you spend diligently worrying about verbiage and grammar, they are hitting your headlines, checking your images and reading your calls to action (CTA). Do you have what it takes to keep a visitor longer?

Negative Aging

While the 10 seconds rule is daunting, you should know that there is some really awesome news that was learned in the same study. 99% of websites have a negative aging effect. Once they’ve been on the page for more than 30 seconds, there’s a good likelihood that they’ll settle in for a while.

Chart courtesy NNGroup

Inbound Marketing FTW

And, here’s why community managers always preach content, content, content. 57% of marketers who blog acquire customers from their blog. That number jumps to 82% if they blog daily.

Imagine if every day, you created a post that generated immediate traffic. Sure, that traffic wouldn’t last long, but that page will stay a part of your site forever. Within a few days, that page will be indexed in search, ready to bring traffic that is directly related to searches on that topic.

If you’ve optimized that page well, people searching for that topic will visit your page. Assuming you’ve made it interesting enough, relevant to their problem or question, you can keep them there for longer than 10 seconds. They’ll read and begin to understand who you are and why that matters.

They’ll linger, clicking off to another page in your site, again, assuming your page is optimized for that purpose. They’ll read at least a few pages, following a well-defined path that will lead to two important observations from them:

• You are an expert on this topic

• You care enough to share your expertise, and are therefore trustworthy

89% of online consumers use search engines when making a purchase decision.

They are searching for information on what you are selling. Wouldn’t you like to be the place they find it? Writing about what you sell, works. Search engines, like Google and Yahoo, and to some extent, Bing, will funnel traffic your way if you have relevant, search optimized content that is of interest to their searchers.

Design Matters

But all the traffic in the world is useless if it doesn’t convert when it arrives. Great pages have images or videos to draw the eye. They use headers and bold text sparingly, but with an eye to the skimmer. They utilize white space to comfort the reader and make important points stand out. They are written to show off one or two, at most, important ideas. They have at least one strong CTA.

They convert.

Great websites get traffic, get read and make sales. We recommend a healthy dose of inbound marketing to all our clients, along with social media marketing and email marketing, to keep your messaging top of mind. This is nothing new, of course, to community managers…

Mariposa is an agency that understands storytelling. We partner with you to craft your story and get your story the attention it deserves.

We’d love to hear what you’re doing, and how we can help.

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