How to get visitors to stay on your blog — and share it with friends

One of my favorite blogging, social networking and website enhancement tools is also FREE!

It’s called Apture.

Here’s what they offer you, at no cost:

“One line of code can triple the time readers spend on your site. Interested?

“Apture’s Contextual Search keeps users engaged with your content by giving them the tools to search and share without even leaving your page. Give your readers the power to search the web for rich content from Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Flickr, YouTube and others all through your site.”

Here’s what happens: you install a bit of custom generated code you get from Apture, after you give them your basic blog information.

After that, when someone visits your site and scrolls down, a slender toolbar appears and invites them to share what they see on your blog using email, Twitter and/or Facebook.

In other words, the Apture toolbar immediately connects your blog to the most important social networking tools on the web today. This means visitors can easily share your blog more easily to their friends and followers.

And that means more traffic and links for your blog.

Visitors can also use the built in search field to find information in your blog’s archives. This easy to use search feature keeps visitors engaged on your blog longer.

Here’s a recent report I received from Apture, telling me the different installing the toolbar has made to one of my blogs:

Apture Report for 2010-11-22 to 2010-11-28

• Readers spent 1.2x more time on your site when they used Apture
• Readers searched 118 times on your site using Apture
• Your readers want to know more about: kathy shaidle, ., tura satana.
• Readers shared 8 articles via Apture
• Using Apture, you retained 192 visitors who would have otherwise left your site

Here’s what the Apture toolbar looks like, customized in red, with the name of the blog itself:

As you can see, you can customize this unobtrusive toolbar so that it color coordinates with your blog’s preexisting design and features the name of your blog site.

As well, after you install the Apture bar on your blog, certain links in your posts will be hyperlinked to Wikipedia. When a visitor hovers over the link, a little pop up window will give them the Wikipedia entry on that topic:

Apture is a FREE way to add value to your site, so visitors will stay engaged longer and share your blog with their friends.

And of course, you can use the Twitter, Facebook and email features on your own blog’s toolbar whenever you want, to get word out about your blog via social networking!

If you’ve read this far, you’ve already seen my Apture toolbar in action at the top of this blog. I invite you to try it and see how easy it is to use.

You’ll probably want to add the Apture toolbar to your own blog, so your visitors can stay engaged with your site for longer periods of time. It’s free and easy to do.