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Bringing readers back - The key to increasing blog traffic
By Mike | August 28, 2008
The noise online makes it very easy for your message to get lost easily. Someone visits your blog, likes your content and bookmarks your site. They really do intent to come back but do they?
The answer is a great big maybe. If they grabbed your feed and added it to a reader like Google Reader they just may depending on how many people they follow. (My average new posts in my reader is huge). If they bookmarked your site the odds are much, much lower.
Think about it. Go check your bookmarks and see how many of them you actually use or even better remember why you bookmarked them. I have and if you were to force me at gun point I would be lucky to remember half of them and outside of a dozen or so have never used the majority of them even once.
That is one of the reasons that I like to have a subscribe form on my blogs. This lets me remind people to come back again and again.
Now there are multiple ways to do this and you can use a service like Feedblitz but I prefer using my own autoresponder (Aweber because they automate delivery off of my feed). The reason is that I can easily send other messages too with an autoresponder.
This allows me to offer an ethical bribe for signing up to receive updates. For this blog I use a piece of software that most bloggers would find useful. As my topic here is WordPress and blogging that is something of value for my readers.
Previously I gave away some tips on generating blog traffic. Both of these target the reader that will want to come back again and again.
As people return and get value they are more likely to comment and take part in the discussion. You build trust and loyalty by continuing to provide valuable content. The comments create even more valuable content for my blog and build a community here.
I can also use the list to get questions as that is the primary focus of my content here. On another note it is almost time to resend as the questions have slowed down but because I am using Aweber I can send out a gentle nudge to get the questions coming in again (hint, hint use the survey form above or comment).
In conclusion if you are looking to increase your blog traffic (and who isn’t?) then you really need to be asking people to subscribe and giving them a reason to do so.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
Mike Paetzold
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Topics: information | We do follow trackback
August 29th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Hey Mike
I’ve been on your subscribers list for about 6 mo.
And your right to keep people returning to your
Blog you have to provide good content.Bottom line
I’ve gotten a lot of useful tips and content that
has broadened my knowledge on blogging.There’s a
lot information out there on the how to on blogging but only a few that I would follow and your one of them.
Thanks Mike
James
August 29th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
@James -I appreciate that and it makes the effort worthwhile. Now to get more questions coming in