One Hundred Thirty Three of My Pages Are Dead Ends

I counted my own archive this morning.

Two hundred seventy five published pages on this site.

One hundred thirty three of them are dead ends.

That means you read all the way to the bottom, you liked it enough to finish, and then there is nothing there. No next thing. No link. Just white space and a Back button.

Back does not send you deeper into my site. Back sends you to whatever feed you came from.

I have spent months telling people to stop renting their audience. Then I went and built two hundred seventy five rooms with no doors between them.

The most expensive moment on your website

Everything you do to get somebody onto a page is the expensive part. The writing. The photo. The headline. The share. Whatever you paid, in money or in hours or in dignity, you paid all of it to get one person to one page.

Then they finish reading.

That moment is worth more than the click that started it. They are warm. They already handed you the hardest thing they had, which was their attention, and they handed it over all the way to the end.

Most websites answer that moment with nothing at all.

This is not a plugin problem

I want to be careful here, because the standard advice is to bolt on a widget. Related posts. You may also like. Six thumbnails in a grid that the software picked for you.

I have watched people install that and watch nothing change.

The reason is simple. An automatic recommendation is a guess made by a machine that did not read either article. Readers can tell. It reads like an ad, so they treat it like an ad, which means they never see it at all.

Three links you chose by hand beat twelve links a plugin chose. Every time.

The rule I am putting on myself

Steal this if it helps.

One. Every article gets two or three links to my own work, picked by a person, placed where a reader is most likely to quit rather than parked at the very bottom.

Two. The link has to promise something specific. Not read more on this topic. Tell them exactly what they get if they click.

Three. The oldest pages get fixed first, not last. The archive is the part of this site people actually use. The homepage gets skimmed. The articles get read.

Four. I count it again next month. Forty four of my pages have a hand picked block on them right now. If that number has not moved, then the rule was decoration and I should stop pretending.

Now go do it to your own site

You probably have this exact problem and have never once counted it.

Open your five most recent pages. Read to the bottom the way a stranger would. On a phone. At night. Half tired.

Then ask one question.

Where do I go now?

If the answer is nowhere, you are paying full price for traffic and handing it back for free.

That is fixable in an afternoon, and it does not cost anything but attention. If you would rather have somebody go through yours and mark every place a door is missing, that is one of the things I do. Start here.

Go count your own dead ends. What number did you get?