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.
