Drive Blog Loyalty – How to Get Repeat Traffic

Anyone who pours sweat and tears into their blog, and actually succeeds in getting new readers as we discussed last week, should make sure it's not all wasted by finding ways to get those readers to come back! You can only do so much to build a solid, consistent and growing readership by constantly chasing new readers — you have to make sure you're keeping the old ones.

Of course that starts with having good content, and many of the techniques we discussed for getting new readers will also help you keep the old ones because some of your existing readers will be found in the places you're looking for new readers.

But you need to find ways to turn new readers into loyal readers, and then turn loyal readers into a real community.

So today we focus on loyalty — how do you get people who liked your content once to remember you and come back? Well actually, you don't. Just like it's hard to break through the noise with new readers, it's also really hard for people you've already convinced! So you have to help them out...

Building Your Blogging Tribe

Be Predictable

For those of us who sometimes like being predictable, here our chance to shine! Making regularly timed posts, at a frequency your readers can come to expect is a great way to get readers loyal by helping them make you a part of their daily/weekly/monthly routine. It also builds a certain trust with your reader knowing that s/he can always rely on getting new content from you.

Cross Promote in your "Owned" Venues

• Email Signature - list your blog address amongst other details but avoid putting the list of "100+ ways to reach me on every communication tool known to man" (you know who you are!). In case you were wondering, yes, it's definitly overkill.



• Your Non-blog Web Site - whether you include a link in the main navigation or a prominent callout on the Home page make sure it's there if it's appropriate. Also consider linking to your blog posts within the content areas of other pages of your site or through callouts to *specific posts* in the left or right sidebars



• Offline - remember the real world? Make sure it and your blog are not strangers. While it's much, much easier to get people to visit your blog when they're already online, don't miss in-person opportunities to build your brand. Tell people at your events or bring some printouts of your most popular post to distribute. Add links to specific posts to your existing marketing collateral as appropriate.



• Your Email newsletter



• Your Business Card (Duh right? But it's so obvious it gets forgotten!)

Cross Promote in Your "Outposts"

Another great place to cross promote is — you guessed it - Social Media.

Chris Brogan and Darren Rowse (of ProBlogger) have a name for this which they call "creating outposts". It starts with having a presence in a few social sites (I would suggest picking 1-2 social sites until you get your bearings on how to do this well) and it can grow to creating entire online communities around your brand and your work within these venues.

Jacob Morgan of The Social Media Globetrotter confirms that "to this day twitter is one of the largest traffic drivers to my site".

Fatemah Khatibloo of TimesTwoMarketing was surprised to find that "Facebook Fans drive a substantial amount of our blog traffic."

For Chris Clark of The Senior List his Facebook fan page has made it to his "top 5 tactics" list.

A key tactic with social media is being able to automatically feed your blog posts to sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Delicious. Two popular tools that enable this automation include FriendFeed and Ping.fm. Even previously Twitter focused tools like Hootsuite are starting to add this functionality.

At the end of the day, every business is as different as is the community of people who follow it. You must identify which methods will actually work well for your business as well as for your resources. Also keep in mind that until you have significant numbers of followers you will be using these tools slowly but surely to build your numbers over time.

Keep Your Inner Circle Updated

There will definitely be moments when a post you've written deserves it's own mini-audience among people you're connected to. Don't deny them! Send individual posts in response to questions, to relevant clients, or to friends and family. Email certain relevant posts and be careful you don't spam them with content that doesn't interest them.

Diane Menke of Myers Constructs, Inc. takes a good approach "We send relevant posts to people we speak to on the phone or in emails if we think they may find it interesting. For example last week I sent an architect we want to work with a link to a post about bids and why we do not do bids." When considering who to send to, specific groups can include:

• Potential and Current Clients
  
  
• Your groups, networks, professional and alumni associations
  
  
• Your friends and loved ones (hey what are friends for!)
  
  
• New contacts you meet at networking events - sending a link to your blog can be a great way to follow up with someone you just met in a professional context so they can learn more about you and you can begin a conversation. Try to think of something they'd be interested in when you meet them and if possible link them to a specific, relevant post.

Email is Still Critical

These days, anyone who volunteers to give you his/her email address, requesting that you add yet another piece of email to their ever-unmanageable inbox has really got to love what you're saying.

These people are gold. Do not leave them hanging by not providing an email subscription option. Feedburner and Feedblitz are the two most popular tools that enable your visitors to get an email each time you add a new post. It's a great way for them to stay up to date with your new content and it's wonderful for you because it's fully automated! Feedburner is very easy to use and is free.

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Feed Me Baby!

In last week's 13 ways to drive new readers to your blog, we mentioned RSS as a "find new readers" tactic by getting other Web sites to publish your feed. But RSS is traditionally known for it's ability to send content directly to an individual. For those of your readers who know what RSS is, it's a great tool for getting them to stay abreast of what you're writing about and click whenever a headline appeals to them.

Cross Post Linking

One of the best things you can do is encourage visitors to get more of what they already like. Linking *within* your blog is an important way to increase "stickiness" (the amount of time visitors spend on your site) and encourage visitors to read more content or save content they find and want to come back too. Andrea Toochin of Trendcetera Magazine uses a tool called LinkWithin to automate this process for her blog and confirms that it has increased the time people spend on her site.

Monitor your traffic

• Referral Source - find out which sites & sources your readers are already coming from. Leverage your success by finding ways to repeat it.
  
  
• Click Streams - use CrazyEgg to see where visitors click
  
  
• Time of day/Day of week - try posting at different times of the day & different days of the week to see if it affects traffic
  
  
• Post Page Views - know which posts are the most popular to learn more about the audience you're attracting and how to keep them coming back.

Take Care of Your Voice

Your blog is an excellent way to build your brand (see my discussion of blogging goals and strategies) and as such you want to be careful about the brand you're inviting people to engage with.

I really like the way blogger & filmmaker Hugh Rhodes put it:

"A blog conveys a voice, a visual aesthetic, and a record of opinion, all in one. I don't write about my film exclusively - I write about movies I have seen, filmmaking strategies, and personal issues related to my career."

Be conscious of the overall presentation of your blog. In addition to making sure your content is useful & relevant you also need to:

• include compelling headlines
  
  
• include people or products that will attract attention.
  
  
• define what your "voice" or "brand" is
  
  
• make sure your site is visually pleasing and easy to read/use and looks clean and professional, it helps with trust and credibility.
  
  
• and as Brock Green of JustinAamir.com reminds us "Stay true to what interests you! This will help to develop your core/niche following."

Feed: Add "The Internet Strategist" RSS updates to your reader or your Web site

Read Related Articles by Maisha:

• Top 13 Ways to Drive New Blog Readership
• 13 Must Have Blog Techniques & Tools
• 8 Basic Blogging Features You'll Actually Use
• Blogging for Coin

Top 13 Ways to Drive Blog Readership

If you have a blog then you know that the biggest challenge next to content is readers. How do you get your audience, who are bombarded by hundreds (thousands?) of messages per day, to focus on your messages?

Of course your first responsibility is providing content your audience will actually find relevant and useful. Your second responsibility is to tell them, often, that your content exists. If it sounds simple, that's because it is. There's no magic trick to building blog traffic if your content is good (and sometimes even if it isn't!)

But it *is* time consuming — and that you should be prepared for.

You should also be aware that in driving traffic to your blog you have 2 distinctly different jobs:

1. Get new readers to find out about your blog and visit
2. Get past visitors to come back

This second one is critical. Meeting your goals will be nearly impossible if you can't get readers to come back to your blog on a regular basis. Sometimes the same tactic can be used for both goals but there are some that are specific to each.

Today I outline the top 13 techniques for getting new readers to your blog, and share experiences from business owners just like you. Next time we'll discuss how to keep people coming back.

How to get New Traffic and New Readers to Your Blog

Link Building

These days the idea of "link building" is almost loosing it's meaning because so many online marketing techniques could fit into this category. Link building for your blog has essentially two major benefits — 1) introducing the audience of another Web site to your blog and 2) boosting your search engine rankings. Link building techniques for your blog include:

1. Posting Comments — posting "comments" in other blogs & public forums can help you reach a highly targeted audience for whom your content is extremely relevant. LinkedIn and Ning are great places to look for communities who are already discussing the topics you focus on.

   But be very careful — commenting carelessly can get you banned from a community or worse — silently (or vocally) tagged as a spammer which will damage your credibility and your brand. Spend some time in the community to see which method (if any) would be most welcome. And by all costs take the advice of business owner and reader Brock Green of JustinAamir.com in avoiding "shameless" self-promotion "do not ask a blogger and its readers to 'come check out your blog'...thats so tacky." I would heed Brock's advice.

   Here are 3 ways you can approach posting comments or new discussions:
   
   a) write a meaningful comment that links to your post as a follow up
   
   b) write a meaningful comment and include a standard signature in all of your comments with your name and a link to your blog
   
   c) start a conversation around the topic you discuss in your post.

   If commenting is welcome at all, using one of these approaches should keep you out of trouble!

2. Directories & Content Aggregators — instead of posting your content in its entirety, these sites simply posts links to your content. Some have found that sites like StumbleUpon and Digg only work if you have top member posting on your behalf, your mileage may vary but if you are willing to spend the time to make this a focus of your marketing efforts it could drive significant traffic to your blog. There are many of these sites including:
   
   • Technorati
   • Alltop
   • Digg
   • Bloglines
   • Netvibes
   • StumbleUpon
   • Digg
3. Cross Linking — encourage other bloggers to link to your blog or posts and do the same for them. If there is a community around your topic tap into that community to raise the profile of each other's content.

   Syndication
   There are many modern ways to allow others to repurpose your articles as content.

4. Cross Promote in other Venues - do you write for any other publications online or offline? Going to be on a public access cable show? Have the opportunity to participate in a goodie bag? Make sure you cross promote your blog in venues besides the ones you own. Fatemeh Khatibloo of TimesTwoMarketing has started mentioning her blog when she writes for industry newsletters and publications and it has made it to her list of top 5 marketing techinuqes.
5. Article Submission sites — people really disagree about this one. Some have either found aggregators to be useless at driving traffic, or to drive traffic that doesn't convert in any other way but Wilson Web has a great list of these sites here and provided some additional advice: http://www.wilsonweb.com/linking/wilson-article-marketing-1.htm
6. Guest Blogging - Offer to write guestposts on other relevant blogs whenever you can (with links pointing back to your site), even if they are small blogs.
7. Guest Bloggers — while this is reverse of content syndication, in a way you are syndicating your brand by enabling other bloggers to promote content they have provided to your site. As Kristin Hornby of NileGuide suggests, "We host guest bloggers to post on NileGuide, who then promote their articles to their own audience. We also have the NileGuide 5 interview series, where we interview other travel bloggers". This can be an excellent way to build new readership and has the added benefit of driving new traffic through a credible referral.
8. RSS feeds — while typically associated with individuals having their own "feed" of your content (which they would only get by visiting your blog in the first place) another very clever way of using RSS is to get people to add a feed of your headlines to their Web site for others to see. Josh Steiniz of NileGuide mentions that they distribute their blog content via free RSS to partners like newspaper websites. Building partnerships purely for blog content syndication is a brilliant way to leverage your content and your knowledge expertise.
9. YouTube — many people don't think about using video to convey their message. Consider creating a low-budget video to support your content and to get your content in front of YouTube visitors. You can even start your own YouTube channel.

   
   SEO

    

10. Basic SEO - Brush up on your basic SEO techniques to help you get your blog ranked well in search engines for the terms you are targeting. To learn more about SEO visit my post Keyword Density: The 9 Places to Put Your Keywords for SEO Power.
11. Tagging & Categories — while you don't have to make categories the primary way you organize your posts, if your categories double as keywords, and appear often as links (i.e. in a sidebar category list or as your main navigation) they boost your optimization for those keywords.

    
    Online & Offline PR

    While really a combination of link building and syndication I mention online PR specifically because of it's potential to be viral. This is an aspect that many people do not consider. When you post a release online it has the possibility to be picked up and spread as "news" by a variety of publications looking for content. Consider whether some of your posts are worthy of an online press release that can be submitted to places like PR News Wire.

    Don't forget about the power of the live and in person. Kimberly Ward of Pinkeggshell hands out cards, sponsors industry events and does high profile charity work, Brad Officer of BradOfficer.com who is in the highly competitive real estate industry says he uses his online blog for real offline help "In this industry, people always ask questions about their mortgage, their home, their situation." He can collect a business card and after the event email his new contact a link to a specific blog post that answers their question. It's a great way to follow up in a meaningful way.

    
    Content Design

     

12. Use Appealing Headlines - Gary Unger of GaryUnger.com who is the author of a popular book and runs a successful LinkedIn group mentions "The better the headline the more attraction I receive. Especially if I use the word 'twitter' in a headline."
13. Name Names — there's relevancy and then there's relevancy. It never hurts to mention people, products or concepts by name — especially if it's a topic that is particularly relevant to your audience. Gary notes that "Landing a good person or product to blog about" has really helped his blog posts to get found and also get shared making it one of his top 5 blog marketing techniques.