How to keep people coming back to your blog

Sometimes bloggers are so busy thinking up ways to attract new subscribers that they forget to keep the people they already have. It’s important to realise that if 90% of your traffic never returns then something is fundamentally wrong with your site and it’s crazy to continue chasing new people until you fix it. Part of the problem though is that when you build a site yourself it’s hard to look at it from an average visitor’s perspective. Here are a few of my top tips.

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Stay up to date

To me there’s nothing more depressing when I land on a new blog for the first time and see a post from 5 months ago at the very top. For a start it tells me you have no interest in staying up to date with your sites subject so even if you do I have great content I’m unlikely to give you the chance to prove it. So you need to be posting as much as you can, especially when you’re just starting out.

Be Real

Surfers like to feel that there’s a real person behind all of this content, somehow it makes it all seem more real. So visitor interaction should be a big part of any blog project, this means you should take the time to reply to peoples comments/questions on posts and also Facebook/twitter if they connect to you though that medium. It’s easy to forget that blogging is as much about community as traffic.

Integrate don’t alienate

Most bloggers are keen to make some money from their visitors once the site becomes more popular. But good advertising that doesn’t get in the way of your content or alienate your core readership is hard to do. Make sure any banners and especially sponsored posts are 100% related to your sites core subject. Not only do highly related ads look more natural they convert into sales much better. It takes time to find the perfect advertiser though and it’s unlikely to be the first one you try.

Grab people instantly

The YouTube generation of today seems to have a shorter attention span each week, so if you want people to take an interest and come back then you need to make them notice you fast. That thousand word post you just wrote may be very informative but if people are put off as soon as they see it there’s no point. If you can illustrate something complex with an image or even a video along with the text people are much more likely to hang around and take it in, it’s a passive medium.

Say something that matters

My last point is that as a blogger you need to find your own voice, I see so many webmasters afraid to put their personal opinion across as it my “alienate” visitors. This isn’t what the net is about, people want to know for definite if they should buy that product or not or if some other blogger is talking garbage. If you can’t find anything interesting to say how do you expect people to be interested in you?

So those are my top tips for creating a blog that people will want to keep coming back to, it’s not an overnight process but that’s part of the fun. PB

This is a guest post by Paul who blogs about the internet marketing world and how to get started in it.