A fellow blogger recently pointed me to a series of posts on ProBlogger focused on how to keep readers coming back to your blog. The four short posts are loaded with good advice for individual and corporate bloggers—particularly for the latter, since returning readers might also mean return business. And returning business, in the form of returning blog readers, might also bring with it the potential for new business. So, you want to keep them coming back.
The posts by Darren Rowse are difficult to improve upon, but there are a few things that come to mind from my own experience, much of which might sound like common sense to an experienced blogger but can be vital to individuals or businesses just starting blogs. So, in my own series of posts, I want to dispense some of what I know, in the interest of helping people create more and better blogs. Here goes.
In Part I, Rowse emphasizes the importance of your blog's archives to drawing in new readers, and he's right. Blogs tend to find their readership serendipitously. Half the time, they'll find their way to you through search engine. These days, when people want information they tend to turn to Google or some other search engine, which will often lead them to you.
The way you take advantage of search engine traffic is, whenever possible, to link back to your old posts where it's relevant in a new post. That's something I only recently started doing after I moved from my Typepad blog to my own domain, in the hopes that linking to my previous posts might help a few more people find my blog. But it's also easy to over-rely on search engine traffic, which might tend to bring in more one-time visitors than repeat customers. Search engines get them in the door, but content is what keeps them coming back.
There are a couple of ways to emphasize your current and previous content that Rowse doesn't mention, but that I've found useful on my own blog, both of which can invite readers to dig deeper into your blog and the conversations (hopefully) going on there. Depending on what blogging tool you're using, there might be a function or plugin that will allow you to add these two items.
The first is a list of the top ten most recent comments on the blog. It's one way to invite readers to join in the discussion, and encourage them to return and check out the latest comments. I would only do this, though, if you already have in place a pretty good tool to control spam comments. Otherwise, you could just end up giving the idea that you get more spam comments than real ones.
The other item I added to the sidebar of my blog is a list of the top ten most commented posts on my blog. I did it partly out of curiosity, because I could only guess the two or three correctly. The rest were a surprise to me, and probably to the readers. The point of this feature is to provide readers a quick look at the "hot" conversations on your blog. With any luck, as more readers participate by commenting, this feature will continue to evolve another pathway for readers to dig deeper into your blog and keep coming back.
I'll have more to say later on about keeping your first time readers coming back. Stay tuned!
