According to research from Harris Interactive, over 75% of U.S adults click on related links for more information. Not only do people click these links at the end of articles or in the sidebar, but this is the second most preferred way to discover new information online (behind search results, of course). Does your business blogging have a related links feature? If not, you might want to add it today.
Get Your Business Blogging in Front of More People
The survey, titled "Behavior Shift: Getting Content in Front of Consumers," wanted to look at how consumers are finding information online, and which methods work and which ones don't. Although it's not a surprise that the related link/articles actually does work, we find it surprising that it works as well as it does (hence, we will be trying it from here on out). Another surprising statistic from this survey is that 31% of respondents said that search engines are not their primary source for finding content online. This means that not only does the related articles thing really work, but that without this feature, you could be losing out on valuable business blogging readership since you would be primarily relying on search engines and social media (hopefully, you have those two things going for you) to fuel your readership. Although that's a good thing, keeping readers on your site longer and serving them information that they would want or need are also good things.
What Makes Consumers Click?
Obviously, having the feature available is only half the story. If you're offering poor quality content, or irrelevant content, then the feature might as well not be there since readers won't click those links anyway. The survey did find that 62% are more likely to click traditional news links versus images, videos and blog posts, which is tricky to think about if you include the feature on your business blog. However, this is great for you if you're taking a brand journalism approach to your content marketing or the types of stories you're telling. But, don't let all this scare you, as 34% did say that they are more likely to click on another article versus the other content types. Of course, all this comes with the fact that the reader actually read the article until the end and to continue to look for additional information, which means that your content still needs to be quality to hold their attention and to keep them looking for more.
What To Do About This
If you're serious about business blogging, increasing your readership, and/or getting more return on your business blogging efforts, then it's worth it to try adding related articles at the end of each of your posts. This could be difficult if you've just started your corporate blog and you don't have a lot of posts. But, if you have at least 50 posts, you should be able to add at least two or three related links at the end. If you have less than that, then maybe just do one related article, or focus on writing more blog posts before implementing this feature.
In our next post, we will show you how to determine what should go in that related links feature, and how many articles should go there. In the meantime, check out our related articles, or perhaps download our "How to Blog" eBook.
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