If the main concern from each and every blogger that’s starting is to get traffic, once you get it the real challenge begin: maintain it.

I would say it’s the hardest task, because getting visitors is just a matter of good content and time, but keeping your visitors for some time can be a nightmare.

While the avg time spent by visitors on your site won’t make a big difference when it comes to make money blogging, the most time, the better.

I can’t really say which is the average – avg time spent on a site from those who visit it, but I would say that more than 1 minute 30 seconds / 2 minutes would be great.

The avg time spent here on Keepblogging is 5 minutes, but that’s because I’m not getting more than 10K UV per month. Not yet. But I hope it doesn’t go down too much.

I said that it won’t make THE big difference if you want to make money blogging, but getting a high avg time spent on your site will give you the possibility to ask more money to advertisers, so it’s always something you should take care.

There are plenty of ways to increase the avg time a visitor spends on your site, although it isn’t a magic formula, you should be able to see some improvements.

How to increase the avg time spent by visitors when visiting your site

1)      Good content: Of course. Always the good content theory. If you post unique and interesting content, people will take the time to read it carefully and check more of your posts, so they will spend more time on your blog because they’re actually enjoying it!

2)      Tutorials: Apart from being one of the best ways to get backlinks and increase your SERP and PR, tutorials can be really helpful to keep your visitors entertained on your blog, as they will probably follow your step-by-step, hence, they will surely spend more time on your blog.

3)      Linking: Linking your website, on an internal way, should be really one of your preferences. Not only it will increase the time spend on your blog, but it will dramatically increase the page views too. Internal linking, that is.

You may want to add a “Related to this” plugin that automatically generates related posts that are related to the current post displayed. I’m using “Add post footer” with great results so far.

4)      Forums: Another great tool, because, apart from increasing the time spent on your site, it will also provide you guaranteed visitors everyday that are coming each day to discuss with the community.

Apart from that, do you want to make a passive income? You may want to put a paid forum, such as Problogger’s, and make even more profit.

5)      A chat: You could also include a chat board within your blog, but I wouldn’t recommend it. It will increase the time spent on your site, but I guarantee you that it will DOUBLE if not more, the spam rate.

Be careful, as it may hurt your reputation.

6)      Videos: Another great way to increase the time spent on your site. When posting a video, chances are that visitors will see the entire video within your website, and not by opening the video on a new window. Even more if they are video tutorials.

7)      Tests:Tests like Daniel Scocco did here. They are great to keep your visitors the maximum time possible.

Do you have more ways? Drop a comment, I’ll update the post and link to your blog with the chosen anchor text.

Thanks for reading.

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