There can be many exit point on a website or blog. I will illustrate some of them in this article. First, we have to know what exactly is a exit point? Those of you who are already familiar with it, please bare with me because not all my visitors are problogger.

Exit Page: In simple words, exit page is a page that your visitor will visit before they leave your website.

Exit Point: Any content in your website or blog that will take your visitor away.

A good example to clarify the distinction between these two will be; all exit page can be a exit point but not all exit point can be a exit page.

An exit point can be:

• Advertisement
• Broken URL (even a 404 error page. There are many ways you can bring back a visitor from your website’s 404 page, customize 404 page is one of the solution.)
• Poor written post
• Image (linked externally)
• Overall any referral link to third party website
• Website or blog loading time
• Visible error on your web page like the following image:
• Global search option (having a search box that suggest visitors to search the web beside your website or blog)

I made this post for a specific reason. I know it is really hard to avoid some of these exit point but if you are new blogger (it’s more important for a new blogger to keep their visitors longer on the blog than a old blogger because, blog readers or viewers has higher trust level for old blogger. Therefore if a visitor leave an old blogger’s blog, more likely they will come back.) Returning or staying longer are both very important.

I have seen many social or blog community website’s sidebox, block or widget that hundreds of bloggers are using. If you are blogging for fun or just for blogging, it’s fine. But if you are trying to make money from blog, be a problogger, sell your product or service or trying to be full time blogger, it is not good for your blog. You ask me why? because these features have a very high exit rate for blogs.

Look at these two images below:

Raise your hand, how many of you clicked on those links? And how many time? Specially while you are visiting a new blog and you have seen a exiting/interesting image in a sidebox like that? I know many of you did. I DID TOO. On an average, if i visited 10 “new blogs” everyday, i at least clicked on 3-4 times on those links. Since the previous blog (the blog where i saw the sidebox and clicked on a image) was new to me and it opened a new window, i hardly went back to that “new blog”.

This is scary, a 30%-40% exit rate from such a small side box (exit point). Yes, it can be true. If it’s not 30%-40%, you are loosing at least 10%-20% of your potential readers, clients, or customers from these type of social network site’s side boxes.