As a blogger, one thing you probably have noticed is the difference in numbers between the people who visit your blog, participate on your blog and actually subscribe to your blog. If you consider commenters and subscribers as “converted hits” on your blog, then you may find the conversion rate extremely frustrating.

Visitors vs. Readers

First off, how do you know if you are getting more readers vs. just hit and run visitors? If you have an analytic program such as Google Analytics installed on your blog, you will have an insight into this trend. Instead of just being fascinated by the number of visits, take a look at the New Visits percentage. Clicking on this statistic will show you the amount of new visitors vs. returning visitors during a specific time frame.

Next, how do you know if people are staying on your site and actually reading? Check out the Bounce Rate percentage, Pages Per Visit and Time on Site. The Bounce Rate tells you how many people are entering your blog on one page, and exiting without going anywhere else. Pages Per Visit, going along with Bounce Rate, gives you the average amount of pages that people visit while on your site. Time on Site tells you how long people are staying on your website.

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As most bloggers know, Darren Rowse of Problogger.net is a great authority on blogging. Back in April, he ran a 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge, where bloggers signed up and received an assignment everyday for 31 days on ways to improve their blogging.

At the time, I was preparing for my wedding and honeymoon, so I didn’t get a chance to do every task. But a few of them that I did get to do made a huge difference. The following are just the first three days of the challenge, and the results.

When browsing other WordPress blogs with awesome themes, I always find myself wondering how someone handled a particular aspect of the layout or functionality. This is especially true with the Thesis Theme, because of the difference in setup due to the Thesis hooks system. So for anyone browsing Kikolani, I wanted to answer the question of “how did you do that” in a new series on WordPress Thesis Theme Customization.

Part Three B: Posts & Social Bookmarking Icons

There are five main customizations that I have done to my single posts.

Custom Byline with Tweetmeme Button

The first customized item is the custom byline, or the details right under the post title, which shows on the main index page, archives, and single post pages. In Thesis Options, under Display, I set the Byline to include “Show author name in post byline,” “Link author names to archives,” and “Show published-on date in post byline.”

Then, in the custom_functions.php, I add a custom byline function to the Thesis byline item hook using this code:

add_action('thesis_hook_byline_item','custom_byline');

In the custom byline function, I include the following to add the comment count to the byline, and also include the Tweetmeme controls as well to make re-tweeting articles easy:

function custom_byline() {
?>
 in <span class="url fn"><?php the_category(', '); ?></span> | <a href="<?php comments_link(); ?>" class="url fn"><span class="url fn"><?php comments_number('0 Comments','1 Comment','% Comments'); ?></span></a> <div style="float:right;margin-top:-19px;margin-right:-10px;"> <script type="text/javascript"> tweetmeme_url = '<?php the_permalink() ?>'; tweetmeme_style = 'compact'; </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js"></script> </div>
<?
}