Blogging Tips

You have a blog. You post content regularly. You market yourself and your brand across the web in order to get return traffic to your site. Now what?

Once you have done all the work to get the readers to visit your site, you should reward them. Give your readers some enticing reasons to stick around and stay awhile. Fill your blog with points of interest and they will be more likely to stay on your site longer and come back for more.

This is important because it adds to your brand, ultimately making you more recognizable in the blogosphere and giving you the credibility to move forward with your blog’s goals. Besides. There is nothing better than a little variety to mix things up, and give readers multiple dynamics to experience once they visit your blog. It is good to offer layers that appeal to multiple types of readers, or just multiple aspects of any given reader.

Start with good content. Those regular blog posts you are pushing out still need to be quality content. Otherwise the rest of the goodies on your site will look like extra circus acts that distract that reader away from poor content. All the branding you do in order to gain new readers to your site will look like marketing ploys to get people to your site, only to be disappointed with the product.

Do not gyp the readers. Ensure that your content is useful, insightful and can become a resource to your readers. Check your work before you publish and fix spelling errors. I am not saying your article has to be the picture of perfection, or that you need to be the world’s best analyst sharing profound thoughts every day. But paying attention to the details of your article prior to hitting that “publish” button will make your articles look much better. The better your blog articles look, the better (more credible) you look.

From there, make continued contact with your readers an easy task for them. Give them easy and obvious access to other ways in which they can contact you or receive your content. Provide links for your various profiles across the social web as well as your RSS feed. This allows readers to interact with you on a more personal level, which gives them the opportunity to learn more about the person behind all the blog articles.

Doing so will make them more inclined to keep up with your content, especially as they will receive updates to your new blog posts if you redistribute your content across your various profiles across the social web. Extending access to your RSS feed will also allow your readers to simply receive your content instead of having to remember to come back and visit your site.

If return visits is what you want, however, try offering some content on your site that is special. This could be a weekly video that you produce, or a reader’s interactive corner where you display entertaining photos or quotes that your readers have shared.

Even this specialized content can be delivered to your readers via RSS, but perhaps you would like to keep some feature on your site exclusive. This could mean that the content is exclusive for site visits only, or it could be exclusive only to paying members.

In this way, a subscription service could be part of the specialized content you offer to readers. If you have any content that has taken you a great deal of time to research and comprise, this may be worth more to you than some site traffic and ad clicks. Save your highly specialized content for those subscribers that are willing to pay for your extra time and effort. These readers show their appreciation directly, and are more likely to support you throughout your career. Of course, the tricky part about this is being able to maintain a level of regular content that makes it worth the price you charge for exclusive, subscription content.