Do you want to make your blog Sticky (or keep people coming back for more)?
There are lots of ways to get first time readers to become loyal to your blog but today Aaron compiled a nice little list of four WordPress plugins that can definitely help.
I’m sure there are more out there though and would love to hear your suggestions on sticky plugins.
I’ve started using the Welcome Back plugin in my sidebar. It displays a user’s MyBlogLog avatar when they’ve made a comment before, and a generic welcome message if they’re new visitors. I think it’s a good way to make your readers feel welcome and like they’re part of a community…plus it’s a good place to put a pitch to subscribe to your RSS feed. :)
John Chow put out a PDF that lists the ones he uses. There is a link on my site or go directly to his.
Where your traffic comes from plays a big part on return visitors. I use the social MyBlogLog site and get return visitors from there.
Michael
I use ‘Oliver Bockelmann’s Nofollow Case by Case‘ to remove the ‘nofollow’ attribute from those that comment on my blog. I think it is only fair to reward those that take the time to get involved and add value to my blog.
I also use ‘Subscribe Remind‘ to publicise this fact, and to advertise my full RSS feed.
The use of ‘Comment Relish‘ also adds stickiness by emailing first time commentators on my blog thanking them for getting involved, and encouraging them to return through personal interaction.
Wow, that’s a lot of links – I hope they get past your spam filter!
– Martin Reed
I really like the input. Very informative.
I just created a new blog btw. Would anyone mind taking a look and maybe giving me some tips?
I’d be happy to post links to other’s website. Feel free to comment on the posts.
http://copiousdissent.blogspot.com/
If you have Ultimate Tag Warrior installed, you might like this clever little plugin, which I’ve been using as well:
http://www.solo-technology.com/apps.html#related_posts
It adds “Related Posts” links to your RSS feeds for added stickiness. B-)
I switched to a self hosted WP site a month or so ago from Blogger and was beginning to think I made a mistake. I am no programmer so I hired one! For $300 he did a pretty nice job on my page (at least I think so). Now I am getting the hang of all these amazing FREE plugins and am so freaking happy I switched. Just tonight I added in the following plugins: Popularity Contest, Share This, and Get Recent Comments. I even messed with some of the code and managed to live to tell this story. Blogging rocks and so does WP! If you are on Blogger you gotta make the switch. You won’t regret it.
I just wrote a three-part series along the lines of Aaron’s post:
http://zacheverson.com/2007/05/25/easy-way-to-share-a-blog-post-with-a-best-friend-or-a-complete-stranger/
As a new blogger, I would probably love to be dugg. Prolem is, I’m very worried about quality right now, and am trying to create a lot of good posts which readers will want to check out.
Copy and content are really important, but from my experience the biggest factor with Digg is who submits the article. Nearly all posts submitted by average users never go anywhere.
I’d say one of the best I’ve found which impacts bounce rates quite a bit is the “Related Posts” plugin.
It’s great for grabbing a new reader and pulling them to other posts on your site.
Subscribe to Comments is a MUST-HAVE for every blog out there. Also, will be keen to try out Subscribe Remind, as it seems really useful.
I love wordpress and all the free plugins, I have played with many plugins and tried them all on my site. the must have: google sitemap xml + daggon sitemap for indexing in search engines.
“email this post” should also help is you have great posts and that your visitors can share them easily
Write quite good.Give you to encourage, next time again come to your crest once(*__*)
WordPress 2.7 Sticky Posts is a built in feature. This is one of the cool new features in WordPress 2.7.
If you have a wordpress version prior to WordPress 2.7, you can consider using the plugin
http://www.thepicky.com/blogging/how-make-a-post-sticky-in-wordpress/