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How to Keep First Time Readers to your Blog – Part IV

Posted By Darren Rowse 1st of March 2005 Blog Promotion 0 Comments

This is the fourth and final post in this series on making first time readers loyal readers. Read previous parts at part I, part II and part III

Promote your RSS Feed – Under my invitation to receive an email newsletter I have an invitation to subscribe to my RSS feed on each post. Again this just gives readers another opportunity to hook themselves into what I write about on a daily basis. Make it easy for them to get involved

Search this site – have a clearly labeled feature that allows readers to search your blog. My readers regularly use my search features to find if I’ve written on specific topics. I tend to use the Google search option that Adsense gives you that allows you to run Adsense ads in your search results. This not only allows your readers to search your site but gives you an other income stream for your blog.

Break your longer posts up into a series of posts – another way to draw people deeper into your site and help them to get to know you is to break up your posts into sequential postings on the one topic – much the same as I’ve done here with this series. In effect what this does is increase the amount of pages in your archives (increasing your chance of being found in Search Engines) and encourages readers to view multiple bite sized pages. Don’t break up posts just for the sake of it or too regularly (it can get a bit annoying) – but use it when your posts are too long for a single one post.

Be interactive – I find that readers are more willing to come back to your blog if you give them a way to interact with you and your site. The most obvious way of doing this is by making a comments facility open to them. Invite them to have their say and to as a question. When they do – acknowledge it with either a reply in comments or even better – by shooting a short email to them to say thanks for their opinion. Other interactive tools include polls, discussion forums etc.

About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. Keep ‘Em Coming Back, Part II
    In my previous post, I addressed a series of posts from ProBlogger, on how to keep new readers coming back to your blog. As promised, I’m back with a second post o

  2. […] ing about design are How to Keep First Time Readers to your Blog – Parts I, II, III & IV. Following that are two excellent posts on […]

  3. […] This is a 4 part series on how to keep first time readers on your blog (or how to make your blog sticky). This series of posts continues at part II, part III and part IV. […]

  4. […] Of course, since I found this via ProBlogger, I’ll also point you to some useful articles that Darren wrote a while back: his series on Keeping First Time Blog Visitors parts 1, 2, 3, and 4. […]

  5. Thanks Darren!

    Your site is fast becoming my top resource for building my blog (small as it is) – even the archive content on ProBlogger is gold dust.

    Point #1 on this post, about promoting your RSS feeds was something that completely slipped under my radar – I had no logos, links or anything and I was wondering why I had so few RSS subscribers.

    Lee
    http://www.unscrambled.org

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