18 Ways To Build Loyal Blog Readers And Make Them Come Back…

If you want to build your blog readership, turn  passive visitor’s into active blog readers  and also keep those readers coming back, here are 18 ways on how you can achieve that

1. Have a posting schedule – Having a posting schedule enables you to post frequently and consistently helps you plan and schedule your content ahead of time your readers know when to expect a new post from you. You can achieve this with a blog planner or a digital scheduling tool.
2. Engage – Let your blog be engaging. Make sure you engage your readers in your blog posts by asking them to participate in polls where they can vote on anything, surveys to fill out, ask for a retweet or even to leave a comment. You can create quick and easy surveys with Google Forms and also poll-maker.com and polldaddy.com are some free sites for setting up voting polls.
3. Respond to comments – try as much as possible to read and thoughtfully respond to every comment. When a reader comments a few times and doesn’t receive any reply, he/she may lose interest over time because he/she may feel like their voice does not matter.
4. Keep content relevant to your target audience – You keep your readers coming back to your blog by putting out content that they would be interested in and is relevant to the audience you are targeting.
5. Start a series on your blog – Starting a blog series is a great way to keep readers coming back, you announce when the next post in that series would be and make sure to link to previous posts as the series progresses. People will want to check back to keep up with the series especially if it’s a topic they are interested in.
6. Collect their emails – You keep readers coming back by collecting their emails, have a subscribe by email widget on your blog and a pop-up box, another creative way of getting emails is by offering freebie exclusively only to your email subscribers.
7. Start a newsletter – When you have emails, you can start sending out newsletters, that is you taking the content from your blog directly to your readers’ inboxes. It’s a way of updating them on what’s going on your blog and also a reminder to check out your blog.
8. Do monthly wrap-ups – A monthly wrap-up post is when you create a summary post of an entire month’s blog activity. It can be a blog post on its own or sent out as an email where you highlight the top posts of the month, the most engaging posts and other highlights that your readers may have missed.
9. Get active on social media – Social media is a great way to connect with your followers and for your followers to also connect with you. Post links to your social media, and share every new post so that your readers who follow you can get updates and find their way to your blog.

10. Proofread and edit your posts – Certain people can not stand spelling and grammar errors so try to proofread, edit your posts and take out any of such errors.

11. Diversify the content of your posts – A great way to keep your content interesting is to switch things up every once in a while. Why not ditch regular text and post a more entertaining video instead? Or do a complete photo blog post, insert an info-graphic or downloadable material into your posts.
12. Have a special day in a week – If you post weekly, make sure you post on the same day each week. And if you most more frequently, have a specific day for a special post and let your readers know about it; for example, wrap up Wednesday, fun post Friday, etc.
13. Link back to other posts – Whenever you are writing a post, try as much as possible to place links to your other blog posts so that your readers can go from one post to another and to another and eventually stay longer on your blog. You can also include some related posts or recommended “You may also like” post links at the end of a post.
14. Optimise your blog for search engines – People are always looking for information online and SEO is what allows people to find your blog when they search from search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. In this post, we mentioned some basic SEO strategies that you can implement even if you are new to SEO.
15. Submit your posts to social bookmarking sites – Submit your blog posts to social bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon and Reddit and also have these sites share buttons on your blog.
16. Use online marketing to reach past visitors – Google Adwords and Facebook Ads advertise your blog to people who have visited before. This is a way of reminding them of what they may be missing.
17. Your blog design – A clean, responsive, beautiful and attractive blog design makes your blog stand out and is one of the first impression anyone who lands on your blog will have. If your blog is probably not responsive or difficult to navigate, people may not want to come back again.
18. Create amazing and unique content – As cliche as content is king sounds. It’s paramount that the content you put out is amazing, unique, authentic, original and personal.

Your turn: Which of these tips have you tried? Which ones do you need to work on? What additional tips do you have? Share all in the comments. Thanks for reading and happy blogging!

Written by Daniella Bature