In my previous post, I talked about how to monetize your blog for profit. It might interest you to know that blogging is not just about getting thousands of visitors daily, the main thing is actually converting those visitors of yours and having them coming back to your blog over and over again. Therefore, in this post, I will be sharing with you how to keep people on your blog and have them coming back for more.
Making Your Blog Tacky
The whole concept of making your blog tacky is to make your readers take a particular action, participate in your blog and to keep coming back for more, below is the strategies you can apply today to in order to make this happen.
Reply to All Comments and Emails
I’ve discovered that so many bloggers overlook their readers and their comments. I make it my personal objective to answer everyone because it shows I care and because of that my readership has been increasing tremendously. My readers know they will always get their answers here and if I can’t answer their questions then I will send them to someone who will.
Get Readers To Subscribe to your List.
The most effective way to get your readers to keep coming back every day is by asking them to. RSS feeds are built to do this for you and though I have touched on it in previous post, I haven’t mentioned how to get the most sign ups possible.
What you should do is to run a heat map on your blog to see where people looked at most and then placed the sign up there. The best place to include a RSS sign up is at the top of your sidebar, also offer an email sign up here using Feedburner email.
You can see I have done this on Topbloggingcoach.com although I use an autoresponder for my email opt-in as it gives me more control over my email readers.
The next place I discovered a lot of people were looking was immediately after a blog post, this is a place you may want to also include an advert or related blog posts. While we are on the subject of subscriptions, sign up for our RSS feed.
Post Frequent Blog Posts
You may ask yourself this question! Why would someone come to your blog day after day if there isn’t anything new to read?
Pretty self explanatory, post daily and you will be much more likely to be successful. What you should do is create several weeks of posts in advance and pre publish them so that every day a new one is published on your blog. This means you can be doing anything you want, anywhere you want and still know your readers are getting fresh new fascinating content!
Social Proof
Social proof is really essential; everyone wants to know if the blog they are reading is dead or not. One thing you can do to show it’s an active website is by showing your RSS readers, you can do this by going to your feedburner account and click publicize and then you can add a stat counter to show how many RSS readers you have.
Another thing you can do is to try and build up your comments, you can do this in a few ways, you can ask friends to comment, you can also ask readers questions in your posts and so they reply to you. If you took my advice and decided to reply to everyone’s comments, then that will also boost your comments greatly and make your blog look hugely more popular.
Conduct a Blog Competitions
This is a great strategy that I’ve seeing a lot of bloggers using, if you offer a blog competition, your readers will return more often to see what’s up for grabs and how the contest is going.
When seeking prizes for your contest, there is no reason for you to be out of pocket, contact your competition or someone high up in your niche for FREE give aways or you can even offer to give the winner certain amount of money. Check out this blog post for an example of what I’m talking about.
Building Relationships with your Rivals
Another really vital strategy to getting decent repetitive traffic is to build relationships with your competition. My rivals often includes me in their weekly roundups and put my link in their blogroll. You really need to reach out to your competition and make sure you do something for them, then they will feel they have to do something for you too.
This works with so many things, if you comment on someone else’s blog, they will comment back 9 times out of 10. If you mention them in a post then they will remember you next time they want to do a weekly round up post.
I hope today’s post has opened up your eyes to some new ideas and hopefully made you think about what your end in mind actually is!
Remember learning is never enough, we must apply.
There are dozens of techniques people have told you to use on your blog, the reason I only suggest a few is because I have actually gone out and tested all of the advice out there and these are the techniques that is working for me for me!
Is there any other method you’ve applied before that kept your readers coming back over and over again, or is there anything related to this topic that I did not mentioned? Please lets discus it on the comment section below.
If you like what you read, please help spread the words by sharing and tweeting it.
Joey Xoto says
Cool post sir,
I think one of the most important things that will keep people coming back to your Blog, is good content. If you can provide real value in your content, people will really appreciate what to offer.
Good content will build strong trust with readers, which will likely result in good interaction with readers on the comments!
Great stuff. Love the blog.
Nwangene Theodore says
Yea, I strongly agree with you Joey, you’ve just hits the nail on the head.
Thanks for coming, hope to see you again.
Mickey says
Great post.
Thanks
Sam Adeyinka says
Hey Joey, I so much love your point about content. I’m an ardent preacher of quality content. Nice points well shared. 🙂
prince says
Hi Theodore i would like to say that getting visitors isn’t a problem but making them come back is the main issue and i agree with your points must especially where you said “reply to comments left on your blog” this is the greatest way to retain first time visitors as permanent visitor. because for me i won’t comment on a blog that the author don ‘t publish nor respond to my comments because it somehow looks like a waist of time thanks bro for the great post
Theodore Nwangene says
You’re right Prince,
I won’t comment on such blogs either. The author has to show that he values and respects my visit by responding to my comments. When he ignores them, it will seem as if I’m worthless to him :).
Thanks for coming brother.
Sam Adeyinka says
Hey Theo, the great!
You have successfully outlined great steps that if well taking and applied on would cause great conversion rate for many different bloggers. See, I don’t know what else to add as you sir have said everything that needed to be said.
Thanks for sharing! It was indeed a nice read for me. 🙂
Sam