If you haven't noticed the lovely Lijit search wijit on the left sidebar here, please leave your feed reader and come check it out. This is a very interesting concept to me - they're taking the Google Personalized Search tools and providing a very user-friendly (and statistical) interface to the tool. A mash-up with a business model? Amazing. I've also read on their blog that they're going to start tracking comments on your sites as well and I suppose integrating that with the other statistics and search metrics you're already getting. Good times.
Also on the Lijit blog, I read about a new coined phrase, or meme, or whatever - The Second Click.
At Lijit we know from watching reader behavior on our publishers’ sites that a huge percentage (33%-50%) of readers come from horizontal search...
We also know that the normal behavior of one of these readers is to read the article that Google referenced and then hit the back button. Reader gone, moment lost, second click wasted.
This is precisely why the Lijit Re-Search feature was added to the Lijit Search Wijit. When you have this feature turned on, Lijit hooks the reader into staying for a third click and beyond. Bottom line, you only get one click to keep to your readers around – do the most you can to mine that opportunity.
The easiest way to see this re-search capability in action is to perform a search. Search for "Second Click" - you should come right back to this article. Also, there's a fun tag-cloud view of the most popular search terms. This really helps - according to my stats, I've had 173 re-searches in the last week, and I the fact that the commonly searched links are right there is responsible.
In the "real world", the Second Click has been coming up because of an announcement by Google to compete with Wikipedia. In the fallout from this announcement, there was some speculation and dot-connecting going on specifically about "The Fight For The Second Click".
Wikipedia is clearly dominating Second Click traffic right now. There are also plenty of folks chasing down second click property - social networks, Mahalo, review sites, anything with the word "social" in the description, really. We've certainly reached the point to start developing the second click strategy at Petentials. Even my two biggest and most sellable ideas right now are all about the second click, but that's not how I would have characterized them until I knew about this meme.
It's not enough to just have the blog anymore - I've made a point to actively attract second clicks on sites like OrlandoScene.TV (home page, also on posts) and Orlando Video (also see a post), for example. The "most recent" only really helps if you're on the 11th or earlier post, but there's a nice wordpress plugin called related posts I've installed all over the place. It requires one line of database massaging, but it's easy and worth it. I'm not positive of how often it works, but as i have several blogs to track, throwing in some click-tracking would be very much worth it.
(side note) For Lijit, I've suggested that instead of most popular searches, they should have options for most recent or recently popular, and I think they're rolling it out soon. Lijit's customer relations are amazing. I was personally greeted by Kevin Hawkins, who actually took a few minutes to read my blog and personalise my welcome letter. This was a huge ego boost, especially from a blogger's perspective. I'm always saying - simply acknowledging someone's work is the biggest compliment you can pay a media producer.
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