If you have a blog, you want to keep readers coming back. You can attract readers in a variety of ways, but keeping them is a little harder. You may end up high in the search engines for tons of keywords and pull in tons of unique page views. But how do you keep these new blog readers interested enough to come back again?Many bloggers don’t. They do all the right things to get people there, but fail at engaging people enough that they’ll come back to read some more. What are the tricks, then, to keep readers coming back to your blog?
There are no tricks, which is a good thing. Tricks are hard. The techniques to get people coming back are instead just common sense that many people seem to forget when they’re writing their blogs.The main technique is to actually write something someone wants to read.
Obviously, your blog has to be interesting. If you get tons of unique page views and no comments at all, then the people reading your posts don’t find them interesting enough to comment on, and they’re probably not coming back.
If you’re using SEO in your posts, then you’re blogging correctly for the search engines. But don’t forget to actually make the posts about something, too. A post about shoes that simply goes on to say that you could pick a red shoe, or blue shoes, and there are 800,000 different kinds of shoes without ever offering anything but that kind of fluff won’t get people to come back. If you explain the benefits of choosing the red shoe over the blue one, then you have actual content.
Make sure that your content is actually something people need to know. Really bad SEO writing about those shoes, for example, might manage to get the keywords in a good number of times and still be about more than listing types of shoes. That doesn’t mean it’s good.
A really unimaginative person who doesn’t have anything to say about shoes might write a post about how you could choose red shoes over blue shoes because you like red better. Or that red shoes are different from blue shoes because one is dyed red . . . and the other, blue. This kind of SEO writing is all over the Internet. It might pull in keyword-related traffic, but who will come back for more of that?
To keep readers coming back to your blog you have to engage them somehow. Don’t use a keyword-stuffed post about nothing, making it interesting at the same time-it’s not that hard to do. How-to posts are very popular, as are posts with useful lists like “Top 10 Reasons Red Shoes are Better than Blue.”
Just don’t stop at a catchy title. Actually deliver what you said you would. Give the reader something interesting enough that they’ll want to check back later to see what else you might be writing about in your blog and you’ll keep the reader coming back.