Having the best blog or the most useful blog post are not enough these days to guarantee you’re going to get more blog readers and nail every first time visitor down that arrive your blog. Without happy returning loyal blog readers, your effort in marketing your blog is an exercise in futile.
A blog with 100,000 unique visitors a month will achieve little to nothing from that figure if the percentage of returning loyal readers is 0%, this is because is hard to make lots of income from drive by traffic or cold traffic. No matter what niche you’re in, no business survive without loyal audience who faithfully trust and buy from you.
Marketing, promotions and search engine optimization might take you far in pushing your content into the hands of massive crowd, but building a following for your blog is not something you achieve overnight or without a concrete efforts on your part in connecting with your audience.
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How to get More Blog Readers And Convert Them to Loyal Friends[/caption]The steps below if executed properly will change the cause of your blog for the better, you’ll get more blog readers and grow your followers base dramatically.
1. Identify your audience.
I always say this to anyone willing to start a blog business; before you purchase domain and hosting or you head over to blogger to set up a free blog…is very important that you identify your potential audience or market
This will give you a great insight into how your blog will be set up, your overall content creation and marketing strategies.Also, is important that you focus your blog topic on a specific topic or niche; writing on every subject under the sun will make you an expert of nothing and people will recognize you as “jack of all trade”.
Without knowing who your target audience is, your marketing effort may take too long before it yield desire result.
2. Optimize for Search engine.
Search engine optimization is one of the great way to find new readers for your blog on a consistent basis. While other means like social networking, social bookmarking and word of mouth are also great for same purpose, search engine tends to be the most rewarding and long-lasting among all.
Optimizing your content across major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo will give you the major boost needed to reach wider audience you may not possible reach and what makes this more good is the fact that these traffic is well targeted and rewarding than any other.
3. Run Contest.
Contest is an easy way to push your blog awareness into thousands of eye balls, while this is a very effective way to get lots of people rushing down to your blog….is not an effective way to get valuable loyal blog readers.
A good percentage of people who visit during this contest period might not return to read your blog further, but at least you have instilled your blog name in their heart and create your image in their thought. If your blog consist of values, you may as well win over some readers.
From there, is all up to you on how you manage to keep them coming back for more.
4. Use Social Media And Bookmarking sites.
When it comes to getting more readers to your blog, social media and social bookmarking sites are core instrument to leverage on and use to achieve your goals.
There are many of them out there, and this makes it very tempting to want to be everywhere taking advantage of them all. In my experience, this is not always a good marketing idea especially for someone with little to no adverting budget. And on top of that, it is very time-consuming interacting on social networking sites with fans and fiends.
Don’t stretch yourself too thin trying to get more blog readers in all the social media places on the internet, focus on social platform that best gives you return on investment…though, in beginning, you have to keep testing to see what works for you and what it is not.
There are tools provided by some social media sites for tracking , analyze, collecting and making use of available data to make better marketing decisions. Facebook for instance has “insight”, which allow you to understand, measure, analyze and collect useful data on how your fans are engaging with your page.
For different reasons and purposes, internet marketers have different social platform that works for them and their type of brands. Find what works for you and use it to your advantage.
5. Craft, Edit and Perfect your Articles Headlines.
It has been tested and proven that articles headlines is the only and first impression that a potential reader will see and decide upon to either visit or click away from your post.
What makes this very aspect more cumbersome to achieve is the temptation of trying to optimize your article headline for SEO purpose.
Though you may win the search engines game by ranking on the first pages of SERP for thousands of keywords….but if your search listing articles headlines sucks and couldn’t convince the reader that your information is going to solve his problem, you’ve just blown away your chances of adding more readers straight out f the gate.
When writing your next blog post….spend more time thinking about your headline than the actual time you spend in writing the post itself. Think over on the first headline that comes to mind, allow for second option to comes in and if possible, search for the third option and if that too doesn’t look good enough, don’t hesitate to find what could be the fourth option.
The idea is to allow for all possible headlines for you post and see which one will work best.
6. Write Quality Stuffs.
A content is classified as quality, useful, valuable, pillar etc…when it meet with the readers expectations and solve his or her problem. Depending on the type of information it contain, a content should do one of the following….
Either it educate the reader more on the subject, or it inform him about an event, place, thing or person….a content could also mainly be produced for entertainment purposes only, or it could tend to provide solution to the reader’s problems.
In whatever one you’re writing, make sure you have the reader in mind and try as much as possible to answer his question with your information.
Another great aspect of writing quality stuffs is in its presentation.
Think about the format and styles to present your reader’s with the information and how best to convey your message to him. Before you start to write, is best you ask yourself few questions so you know exactly what to deliver and how to deliver it.
- Who is this post for?
- What problem is he facing?
- How will I get him the information needed to solve his problem?
- In what format should I present the solution?
- Where does this person hang around most online, so I can reach him quickly?
Once you can offer definite answers to these questions and more, you’ve set your one foot on the right path to success in your content marketing effort.
7. Be Open Minded.
One of the very quality required of you to connect with your readers and win them over as friends is to open up and relate to them like you’re from same world. Don’t hold anything back from telling who you are – from your childhood to who and what you have become of today.
Occasionally, you can post pictures of your life activities places you went to, vacation you attend with family and friends and on it goes.Your about me page is a very good place to tell all about you to your first time visitors and make them feel like they are part of you.
Don’t feel ashamed to tell that ugly side of you….. everyone has his or her share of it.
In fact, it makes you look matured and respected by your readers, they’ll gradually feel that emotionally attached to you and your blog. This will help you most in the long-run and create bonds between you and your readers.
8. Don’t hard sell.
I know everyone wants to make money from his blogging activities, and except that you’re hobby blogger or just blogging for the fun of it…then you won’t care about making money from your blog.
But the trust is that, the moment money becomes your primary reason you’re into blogging…you’ve set one foot on the wrong side of building a popular profitable blog and once your readers see it evidently in your writing that you care for noting other than money….you may lose them for ever.
If you’re writing a review or is your main model of making money from blogging, don’t just talk about the positive side of the products or services alone, write about and in full details the pros and cons of the products or services.
Remember, your readers depend on you for authentic information and consider your blog as the go to place when they need to make a sound decision.Be plain in your review and allow them (your readers) to make the decision on either to buy or not to buy on their own.
It will help you and save you from being taking as spammer or snake oil marketer.
What other ways have you used to convert blog tourist into loyal blog readers?
Would love to here from you...