Lijit is the brain child of Stan James, stemming from his master’s thesis project Outfoxed. Outfoxed was social network combined with a browser plugin. It worked by appending markup to your search results pages telling you who might know whom, and how much they trusted an individual result. Obviously a social network that only works when there is a bunch of people on it combined with a browser plugin is a tough business model.
Lijit was born of one of the primary values of Outfoxed, trust-based searching. Lijit allows you to create your own network of pages including social network profiles, blog, delicious tags, and many other things all searchable from the Lijit widget placed on your page. The setup is easy, and it leads us to the 5-8%.
The 5-8% is the figure reported by Micah Baldwin of Lijit as the average percentage of visitors who click on one of Lijit’s suggested links, which come from what I believe to be Lijit’s finest feature. First we start with a Google search for “term sheets”.
Down at the 10th link position you will see “Term Sheet Series Wrap Up” by Brad Feld. I am headed there 1) because he has the Lijit Widget installed, and 2) because he a friend and I like his page.
When you click on the link to his page, notice the lijit display at the top labeled “Looking for more about term sheets?” This is where Lijit has made its mark. It has given the visitor another place to go besides back.
Lijit is wonderful tool to keep more traffic not just in your site, but in your content. I highly recommend checking them out. If you have questions, feel free to post them below and maybe Micah will be paying attention.
