How to Keep People on your Blog Longer

So… what are some specific things YOU can start doing right away
to increase your blog visitor retention rates?

1. Make your Message Clear in Each Blog Post.

Using personality in blog posts is generally a good thing,
but if you continue to ramble on and on with no clarity as
to what you are trying to say, people will likely move along
to the next thing. You want to not only engage your visitors
in your blog post, but also let them in on what it is you’re
trying to say. There’s not much worse than having someone read
your blog post, and be clueless as to what you were even
talking about in the first place. The use of screenshots and images
within the context of your post is great for this purpose.

2. Make Sure you KNOW your Audience!

Before you even begin blogging, it’s important that you know
your target audience! This way, you can be sure that your
content is relevant to them. unrelevant content will surely
push people away. If you aren’t sure how to write to your
specific audience, this SEOmoz video will really help!

Creating Customer Personas
==> http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-creating-marketing-personas

3. Check your Analytics!

If you aren’t tracking your analytics, then how do you even
know how much traffic you’re getting? Luckily, Google has a
free service called Google Analytics (Which is always the first thing
you should do when starting a new blog)
LINK: http://www.google.com/analytics/

Inside your analytics account, you can track things such as
how long each visitor stays on your site, which keyword search
brought them there, and bounce rate. All of these factors can
really help you determine what’s keeping your visitors on your site,
or pushing them away. We highly recommend that you get really
familiar with Google Analytics for this purpose!

4. Encourage Your Visitors to Subscribe!

Whenever possible (with out being annoying of course), you’ll
want to invite your visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed and/or
email newsletter. Generally, it works best to place these forms
at the top of your sidebar or in your header. This simple idea
is a great way to keep visitors coming back to your blog!

5. Post Regularly

A dead blog is just that – A Dead Blog! If you aren’t posting
regular content to your blog, it gives the appearance that you
don’t plan to share anything else anytime soon. Why would
anyone want to come back to a site that doesn’t update their
content? You want your blog to be a source of information that
they can come back to time and time again. It’s just common sense!
Make sure you update your blog often, and participate in any
blog comments that people leave.

6. Social Proof.

This next tip ties in with #5 in that you want your blog to
be seen as a popular place to go for information. This can be in
the form of blog comments, amount of RSS subscribers, etc… If
your blog is fairly new, don’t worry. Just start encouraging your
visitors to get involved, and leave comments / share your blog
posts with others. Over time, it will gain much needed popularity
and social proof.

Of Course, these are just a few ways to make your blog more sticky,
but they definitely help! The main thing is to pay attention to
the actions of your visitors, and keep testing new things with your
blog.

7. Do Regular Internal Linking in Your Blog Posts!

Google likes internal linking on your site if the links go to
related topics. It’s good to link to one or two other blog
posts within your blog content, but only if it ‘makes sense’
within your post. This helps the search engine spiders to
crawl your site easier, and most importantly, it will help
to keep readers on your blog longer.

Share some of your ideas in the comments below.

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