There are a number of challenges to being a successful blogger and running a successful blog. Two of the early challenges that you will face are coming up with content and attracting your initial batch of blog readers. Both of these can be tough obstacles to overcome, but there is one other challenge that face you that you may not even think about. How to go about making your blog sticker.
Making a blog sticky means creating ways that convince or influence your readers to either stick around longer or come back more often. Capitalizing on repeat readers of your blog can increase your blog’s growth and can also alleviate a little bit of the stress involved with continually trying to find more and more new readers. Making your blog sticky is a good thing, and here are five tips designed to help you do this.
1. Make It Easy On Your Visitors
There are a number of times that a blog visitor comes across a blog, has the kind of experience they want to recreate, but there is no easy way to remember or make the blog a part of their daily internet activities. Counting on your visitors to bookmark your blog and then come back is sometimes giving them more credit than they deserve. A blogger should make it as easy as possible for interested readers to come back again and again. This means placing links to RSS feeds in prominent locations, offering RSS by email to those who want it, running an opt-in newsletter, start a Twitter account and then tweet every time you post a new blog entry, as well as taking any other action that creates an easy chance for a reader of your blog to come back again and again.
2. Mine Those Golden Posts
When traffic to your blog spikes because of a particularly popular piece of content you wrote, you should feel good. Beyond pumping up your ego though, there are other things that you can do. The first thing you should do is install one of the many plugins that are available that will display similar posts below that popular entry. When a post becomes popular, it is a goldmine and needs to be cultivated. Manually inserting links to other areas of your blog on that post is another good idea. The point is that traffic is coming to that post, focus should be placed on how to direct that traffic elsewhere on your blog when they are done reading that entry.
3. Interact With Your Readers
One of the best ways to make readers feel like they want to come back again and again is to make them feel they have a connection to the blogger. There are a number of ways to do this including promptly replying to incoming comments from your readers, place a contact form prominently so that readers can ask questions of you if they have them, running competitions and contests where readers can participate, offering polling options to find out what readers think, and more. Reader interaction is a great way to get blog traffic to come back over and over again.
4. Put Your Museum Pieces On Display
Do you have high quality blog posts every so often that you are particularly proud of? Every so often do you write the kind of blog posts that you know are something every visitor to your blog would appreciate reading? Isn’t it too bad that after a week or more those get regulated to your blog archives and may not get the attention they deserve? There is something you can do though, place a section in your header or sidebar that contains your featured posts or popular content. This way your readers, new and old, can check out those first class posts that you are so proud of any time they would like.
5. Staying Active Is Good For Your Blog Too
By far the best way to make your blog stickier is to be an active blogger. When readers come across a blog that is seldom updated, they may think that the blog is either not worthy of continued readership or that the blogger running it doesn’t take it seriously. If the blogger doesn’t take a blog seriously, why should the reader? Being an active blogger means that your blog will have a very good amount of quality content, but it also means that your readers can always count on new information to read whenever they visit your site. There is something to be said for being looked at as not only a source for quality information, but as a reliable source for that information as well.
Running a successful blog is very rewarding, both personally and sometimes financially too. The hard part about blogging though has always been gaining readers in the first place and then getting them to come back over and over again. This process of making a blog sticky, or memorable, is not the easiest thing to do, but it is very doable. The content of your blog is absolutely the most important thing you’ll ever add to your site, but the second most important part is your blog’s stickiness. You can make your blog stickier in a number of different ways, and if you do, the reward will be not only attracting initial traffic, but having the type of blog that your readers turn into a regular part of their internet experience.
