Claiming your own stranded visitors
Today we are going to talk about stranded visitors left in the middle at your website. No, this is not a talk about confusing navigation systems on your site/blog. But today we are going to talk about 404 pages.
No matter how hard we work, we can still get few things wrong, few links doesn’t go where they should be. And our visitors end up on a 404 page. There are few options after this point, your visitors can take.
- Click Back on the browse button and search again.
- Click bank on the browse button and try to click again (most likely).
- Check if there’s a bad URL or miss-type (least likely).
- Leave your site completely (Most likely).
The most important information you should take is that you have a lost a probably loyal readers (or brand evangelist like Guy Kawasaki says).
When I changed my 404 error page on one of my blog, I see a jump in subscribers. Though I am not sure if I got those people from my 404 errors or not (I know I know, I should be testing it). Anyways There isn’t any major traffic increase to predict any other reason other than 404 errors.
No need to worry though, we can easily fix this thing for you.
How to customize your 404 errors
Step 1 : Get some insipiration from mine
Step 2 : Get some insipiration from others like Problogger
Step 3 : Get some more insipiration from google
Step 4 : Create your own 404 Error page.
Now How to Direct your traffic from 404 Page to your blog?
Here are few thing to get you involved your visitors into 404 pages.
1. Guide them – If you check my 404 page, you’ll see that I am telling them to search or to subscribe or to find content on my blog home page.
2. Ask them to take action: You have to tell people to take action if they still can’t find the content (ie email me).
3. Ask them to subscribe. – Again I am using Feedburner to provide blog updates via email. I’ve found feedburner’s delieverability exceptionally good.
4. Assurance of privacy – You can see that I am trying to re-assure about giving out email address.
These simple tips not only will help you guide few of your visitors in right line, but also help you build subscriber list (isn’t that your goal?).
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