I’m not making this up. At least on my blogs (WebGrrrl.net and my other niche sites), this seems to be the trend.

Take a look at WebGrrrl.net’s Google Analytics one-year comparison for the month of September. My blogging activities were considerably more last year than this year, yet I’ve noticed a marked improvement on the bounce rate. In Google terms, “a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert.” Looking at the stats, this means that once a visitor reads one post from my blog, there is a 99% chance that the visitor will stay in my blog and go read the next post, instead of going to other sites.

I’m surprised that WebGrrrl.net was able to achieve a low bounce rate, due to the fact that the blog content isn’t well-focused. I take bounce rates seriously especially on my niche sites, because this means that my visitors are digging deep into my blog content, hence the chances of them clicking on my ads are higher.

One stats you don’t see in the screenshot above is my traffic sources. Visits from search engines to WebGrrrl.net have increased by almost 20%, and I’m seeing a similar improvement with my currently-idle niche sites. Everyone who’s into monetizing their web sites know that search engine visits are like hearing your shop’s doorbell ring every time a paying customer comes in.

I’ve yet to really sit down and study all these data I’m getting, but if it’s anything like the advice Grizzly gave, saying that you make more money by not updating, then there should be a big fat nose-inflating grin slapped squarely on my face.

Oh, wait. Yeah, there is

As SunEGrl mentioned in her post and as every EntreCarder knows, EC has partnered with SezWho, thus enabling you to earn EC credits every time you comment on other EC members’ blogs and vice versa. This partnership is a step up from just dropping your EC cards, and would require ECers be more proactive participants in each others’ blogs.

I first saw SezWho implemented on Andy Beard’s web site, and contrary to what SunEGrl claims, the SezWho plugin didn’t slow down Andy’s blog noticably as far as I know.

If you’re looking to increase your traffic and visitor participation, you should definitely try EntreCard and signing up for SezWho.

As for WebGrrrl.net, I don’t plan on installing SezWho any time soon, as my current mission is to increase traffic from search engines instead of just relying on social bookmarks. I’m already using 13 WordPress plugins in this blog, and I don’t plan on bombarding my site with anymore plugins unnecessarily.

I do foresee myself using SezWho on this blog in the future, mainly because it can be a wonderful boost of exposure for commentators on this site, as SezWho not only shows you the comments you made on this blog, but other blogs that have SezWho installed. Makes bloghopping more fun, too.