Your task for this first day of the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog Challenge is to email a new reader of your blog.
Create a great impression upon a brand new readers to your blog by choosing a commenter that is new and emailing them to thank them for their comment.
It might not sound like the most profound tip but I’ll let you in on a secret – this is one of the main strategies I used to build up ProBlogger’s audience a couple of years ago.
What I found is that when you do it the chances of the readers that you email coming back to your blog again increases significantly. Get them to come back to your blog once and you increase the chances of them coming back again… and again….
So email a reader now, thank them for commenting and tell them that you’re looking forward to further interactions.
Make sure you include a link back to your blog so they know who you are and make the email relevant to their comment (ie answer a question they asked or add to their comment in some way). While there are some tools out there that do this automatically for you – the more personal you can make it the better.
This simple tip takes just a moment to do but can create a loyal long time reader. Do it at least once a day (or set yourself a higher target) and you’ll build your blog consistently over time.
Is this Tip Not SPECTACULAR Enough For You?
Last time I shared this tip with a fellow blogger they rolled their eyes at me and told me that they didn’t want to find just one more reader for their blog – they wanted hundreds or thousands.
This blogger failed to realize two things: (more…)
very good article. I was reading up about branding ideas yesterday and learnt that emailing every simgle person who leaves a comment is an effective means of making a blog successful and it’s what I believe will work. I’ve just installed a plugin called “comment Relish” but after reading your article i think im going to delete it and send my emails by hanf to every person. I write alot of pillar articles so i’ve had quite a few people asking questions so i have a reason to email. Better getting started designing my signature first!
P.S.: I forgot to mention that I deactivated comments in the meantime, mainly out of frustration.
Claus
Obviously my first comment got lost somehow, so here it’s again:
My problem with all of my blogs is that I don’t get comments I can answer in the first place! :-(
My present blog:
http://grafomatic01.twoday.net/ [in German ]
This one’s on graphics/post-production. No comments, so I decativated the comment function (as in my previous blogs).
I’m asking myself what I’m doing wrong?
Here are some older post I wrote in English (and in my “older” blog):
http://artificial.twoday.net/topics/Film+und+Fernsehen/?start=10
Can anybody give me a hint?
Thanks,
Claus
Hey Claus,
I guess one main reason could be, that people will have problems finding you.
try a search for som keywords and google, and see if you pop up on the first two to three pages.
If not spend some time reading this blog (or even plus some others) looking for entries about “SEO”, “search engine optimization”, “creating valuable content”, “getting traffic” …
If nobody reads your posts, nobody can comment, right ;)
gl
Kim
When I was starting up my blog I had read in a few places that for very young blogs it is better to have comments turned off. The reasoning behind this was readers might come and see 0 comments everywhere and just leave off the bat.
Now I am wondering if leaving comments off was a bad idea? (they are still off)
Thanks for this series. As a new blogger, this is golddust. CHeers
Just wanted to say thanks again, many months later, for this great tip. It has been BY FAR the best thing I ever did as a blogger, and definitely helped with readership and with general good will on the net. I now have readers who tip me off to stories, etc. which often lead to good posts. And as simple as this is, I am not sure I would have thought to do it if I had not read this post … another great tip from ProBlogger!
Good tip. I emailed one commenter and one who has been a guest post We’ll see what happens.
I am going to day 2 .
Thank you for this tip. It seems so simple but in this day and age of non communication, a little personal touch goes a long way.
Thank you for this tip. It seems so simple but in this day and age of non communication, a little personal touch goes a long way.
Darren — I’ve been doing this regularly, and I can confirm that it works very well. People marvel that you took two minutes to dash off a little line.
As for dismissive responses: I think that this approach works *exactly* like a merchant’s efforts in the offline world: you advertise and market yourself to bring hundreds or thousands of people into your store, but once they’re in the door . . . it’s personalized attention that’s going to bowl them over and keep them coming back for more.
The good merchant never scorns the lone customer.
This is a great idea–day one email a visitor–I’m going to do that right now.
Thank-you!
I thought I left a comment here-but I can’t find it. Anyway-I ran into a little problem with the first tip-email one reader of your blog. How do I find their email addresses? And does it count to simply reply to their comment on your own comment page?
Leave a comment to other blog as my experiences is a thing to do to get a better blog popularity.
I found your site on google, great site, keep it up. Will return in the future. Submitted this post to Google News Reader.
Love your blog!! Can’t wait to learn more tips from you about blogging.
I know this is long after the fact, but this is a quality article.
What if this is a new blog and I don’t even have 1 comment yet?
I love this ideal but no one has commented or emailed me yet.
What to do then?
Thanks!
Amazing tip. I love your blog
I am a long time reader, first time commenter on this excellent website. First of all congratulations on a superb site. I’ve spent countless hours trawling through your advice :-)
My only question so far is, using Blogger like I do, how on earth do you get people’s email addresses? I would say only about 10% of commenters leave email addresses, maybe less. In fact the only ones I can think of are people who have websites of their own.
Would be interested to hear how you suggest a solution, other than move to WordPress!
Thanks. Jonathan.