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This is a guest post from Hendry Lee. Hendry helps bloggers overcome technology challenges in starting and growing their blogs. Get daily tips, techniques and strategies by visiting his blog at blogbuildingu.com.

Not all traffic is created equal. Thousands of visitors may not mean a thing to your bottom line. On the other hand, 100 visitors may turn into 20 feed subscribers or more if they are qualified.

Bloggers may brag about their numbers, but at the end of the day, all that is matter is money in the bank.

Why Do You Want Repeat Visitors?

Although a blog is just another web site, what makes blogging so powerful is the fact that it is not a one time interaction between a blogger and his/her readers. Interaction and communication should be integrated tightly into every blog.

Repeat visitors are in many ways better than first-time visitors. Depends on your traffic strategies, when readers come to your site, at first they may not know about you at all. They are looking for information, and hope that you are able to provide that.

Article marketing is an example of traffic source that brings in qualified visitors. When the readers visit your blog, they already know about you because they have read your article(s). It they don’t like what they read, there is no reason they click and visit your site.

Repeat blog readers are even better. They subscribe to your RSS feed because they want to get more content from you. Often they are also bloggers and influencers who will tell others about your blog instead of merely readers.

Of course, they are also more likely to become customers or clients…

After working so hard and spending a great deal of time to get people to your blog through blog promotion, you want them to come back and become your loyal audience.

7 Ways to Keep Visitors Coming Back to Your Blog

You may be familiar with some of the items in the list, but it is important that you don’t underestimate these tactics. A little bit of change in how you approach each of them may make a big difference.

You may not want to use more than a few tactics at the same time, because they can be quite overwhelming. It is better if you focus on one or two things at the same time, spend time to do them right before moving to another one.

1. Make your blog design / layout easy to navigate. It is helpful if you stick with clean design. Usability is a complex subject, but you can make use of common sense to distinguish between a blog that is easy to use and otherwise.




2. Be specific, produce content your audience wants. By specific, I mean you should target a niche instead of trying to be everywhere at the same time. The more specific you are in your content, the more people will be able to resonate with your message.




3. Gain insights into the readers. Web analytics software will show you which content is popular among your readers. Getting this kind of information is priceless. It can potentially change the direction of your blog for good.




4. Encourage comments. The difference between a blog and typical web site is that with a blog, you already have comments feature integrated as part of the blog. If you choose to enable this feature, you will be able to cultivate relationship with your readers in a more direct way than with contact form or even email marketing. This establishes a bond with the readers.




5. Tap into the power of email marketing. Email is still a powerful way to reach out to your audience. It is possible to use this in combination with a blog, especially as a follow up mechanism.




6. Highlight the RSS feed. Another great option is RSS feed. Many people are hesitant to give away their name and email address nowadays. An RSS feed solves this problem because what the readers have in their news reader is 100 percent opt-in messages.




7. Add a discussion board. This is another popular form of social interaction online. Forum can be very addictive. When you have a group of like-minded people gather together on a virtual place, they tend to visit your site back more often.

With social network apps like Ning, now it is possible to create your own social network too. However, I know I have said about this, but you should not try to juggle too many balls at the same time. Building a blog can be a very rewarding experience and part of it comes from the interaction you have with other bloggers and your readers.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 7:30 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.