15 Things You Can Do To Encourage Readers To Return

This is a guest post by Dean Wood.

Getting a single visitor on to your blog is the result of a number of marketing endeavors. Imagine getting your visitor on to your blog only to never see that person again. What exactly do you do to retain your visitor’s interest long enough to make a positive impression? Enough to make that visitor want to return again?

 

1. Update Your Blog Regularly

This will help increase your blog rankings and give your visitors a reason to come back to your blog. Don’t allow your blog to be dormant for more than a couple of days without giving some incentive to the search engines.

2. Offer Valuable Content

Research what kind of content your target audience will find helpful and valuable. Offer it freely; don’t hold back. Provide industry-related tips, how-tos, breaking industry news and so on to keep your visitors engaged. Make sure your content’s quality is high –readers can discern original, high-quality content from half-hearted, duplicated efforts.

3. Work On Your Subject Matter

Above all, keep honing your subject matter expertise; this is what your visitors are really after. The more of an authority you are in your space, the more respect you’ll garner from your visitors, along with their loyalty and dedication over time.

4. Entice Visitors With Additional Information

While posting an article, look for articles, research aspects or value-add information related to what you’re posting. Provide links to such sources, with a line explaining the value of each. Let visitors see you’re not just an SME but also a generous, thoughtful and resourceful person. Who knows, you may get some mileage out of it.

5. Entice Visitors To Subscribe

Offer free eBooks, premium content, video tutorials, special offers and discounts to entice people to subscribe to your newsletter. You can consider creating a ‘subscribers only’ page, where you can offer premium content, special contests and so on and use that as your enticement.

6. Reduce Visitor Frustration

Make sure your blog loads quickly and easily on the least internet bandwidths. Check your blog for broken links, bad navigation, and other usability aspects now and then.

7. Allow Easy Content Sharing

Make sure you add all the relevant social media Share buttons at the end of your posts. Throw in a ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ email link as well, just in case your visitor doesn’t favor social media. Put up your RSS feed button prominently on all main pages to enable visitors to get live updates.

8. Make Your Blog Look Friendly

Use an attractive, friendly and easy-on-the-eyes theme. Opt for a reader-friendly color scheme, fonts, and font-size and so on. Keep ads to a minimum – especially the ones that keep flashing till you click them. Design an easy-to-remember, beautiful logo so that they recognize it anywhere. Keep the look and feel consistent on all pages.

9. Answer Questions Promptly

It’s very important to be prompt in this area, especially while you’re still building repeat traffic. Include a ‘Contact Us’ link in your navigation bar so that people can quickly email you or ping you on social media with their questions.

10. Create An FAQ Page

This page should answer most common concerns and questions pertaining to your products, business policies and so on. Provide a search feature in the FAQ page so that people can look up questions using keywords. Watch out for the keywords they use and keep updating your answer list.

11. Ask For Feedback

Set up an interactive, periodical feedback survey contest on your blog. Allow readers to contribute, discuss among themselves and generally have a good time. Invite people on your email list and don’t forget to offer something interesting as a reward.

12. Don’t Spam Your Visitor

Keep your newsletter fresh, interesting, respectful. Try to always to provide value along with your updates. Don’t use it to spam your visitors. Remember, customer acquisition costs much more than retention, so hang on to the ones you have.

13. Stimulate Your Readers

Ask questions at the end of every post – get reader’s opinion, try to spark a controversy. This will ensure that even after finishing your post, the reader stays on your page for a while, pondering your question.

14. Set Up A Chat Forum

Chat forums are a great way to get your readers involved. You’ll have moderate a few comments, you know you cannot ignore Google’s policies – but still, your audience will love the chance to express themselves freely and really get involved with your blog. It helps build a sense of community and loyalty among readers.

15. Ask Readers To Contribute Content

Who doesn’t like their two minutes of publicity? Get your readers to contribute their thoughts, ideas, opinions, testimonials and reviews of your products, in their own words. They can include images, videos or podcasts. Offer to be the editor to those that are not confident of their writing skills. Readers will spread the word about ‘their content’ and do your blog’s marketing for you!

In these times when there are thousands of bloggers trying to cover same topic, it becomes very important to encourage your readers to come again to your blog. Do you own or manage a blog? If yes, please share the things you do to encourage your readers to return with us in comments below.

Image credit: Tim Seed / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

About the author
Dean from conversion optimization company Invesp. Invesp helps business in improving their marketing campaigns by offering services like landing page optimization, full website optimization, conversion funnel optimization and lot more.