I today wrote a post on how to increase page views on blogs.

I was wondering what techniques you all use to increase page views on your blogs?

P.s The post can be found by pressing the WWW button.

Ideally start with content that people find useful, but I assume you're looking for more than that.

I think your design can play a big part. If it's appealing it's more likely people will stick around long enough to check out what you have to offer. Adding images in post seems to help a lot since they immediately draw the eye and keep the visitor's attention long enough to dig deeper into your content.

Related posts, popular posts, etc plugins should all help since the should be directing people to content they've at least shown some interest in.

Links within your content should also help drive people to other pages and you'll see many people feature prominent links to their best posts or post series.

Where people come from also plays a role. For example people who visit my blog from here tend to spend more time and view more pages than people coming from search engines. Someone visiting from WT already has a sense of who I am and what they might expect when they land on my blog so they're more inclined to stay longer and look around. Searchers could be hit or miss depending on the query used to find me. Sometimes the query matches and the page they land on is what the searcher wants, but other times it's a query that realistically shouldn't be pointing to my site, but for some reason does. The latter group will usually quickly leave.

I think ultimately it's really your design and your content that keeps people on the site the most, but all the other things can help.

On the point of adding images into your posts. Where do you source your images from, it is something that I am looking to do on my future posts, but was unsure about things such as copyright.

One way is obviously to create your own images, but beside that there are plenty of images around licensed for your use. Any of the stock image sites will sell you images you can use in any way.

But I'm guessing you'd prefer a free option. Here's a post that lists some sites with free images you can use.

You'll notice one of the sites on the list is Flickr which offers images under several Creative Common licenses. Skellie put together a great post on the different licenses with links to how you can search for images under each license. I think most people you see using images in posts now are grabbing them through Flickr or purchasing them from one of the royalty free stock image sites.

Thanks mate!

Make a tool that lends itself to the refresh button. what i mean is that it gives a different result each time you use it or refresh the page