One of the ways to take your blogging business to an ever-increasing dimension is to make your readers want to go and come back. However, this happens to be a very challenging task.
At any time, everyone visiting your blog will likely click away, regardless of how long or helpful your content is. While we try to keep readers engaged longer to boost dwell time, we also need to find ways to encourage them to return for more.
Keeping them longer
Before I delve into giving you some quite useful tips on how to get your readers coming back for more, let’s discuss a little bit on how and why you should try to hold them for some minutes on your websites.
When readers land on your blog, it’s generally because you attracted them with the title of your article.
What people see on Search Engines before clicking to read more of what you have is mainly the title of your article. Of course, the Meta Description counts a lot.
On Social Media, your short description gets attention. How attractive these two elements are (Title and Meta Description) influences your Click Through Rate (CTR)
For someone to click, chances are that you’ve gotten their attention and they are now in the mode to read more. A couple of things must therefore be put in place to make sure they do not pogo-stick or completely close your page:
- Your article title and description should be clearly depicted in your article introduction. That’s actually what makes them want to go beyond the intro. If the intro is completely off, it may appear misleading.
- Have a friendly formatting of your text. Avoid boring paragraphs and unnecessary long sentences. Use headlines, bullet points, attractive graphics to make the article refreshing.
- Avoid distractions on your website.
- Improve the load time of your pages.
- Link to relevant pages on your blog
- I also advice getting premium themes. Generally, you get the best visual representation with them.
- Etc
But why is it important to improve dwell time?
For readers, it may not be an important metric. For you and any advertisers wishing to gain exposure on your blog, this helps measure the quality of satisfaction your readers get from your blog.
The more time they spend on your blog, the more it shows they get value and satisfaction:
Sites with Average Time on site of 1 minute and above generally do indicate a good content value. If your dwell time stats are below this mark, you should seriously consider doing something about it.
If you care about attracting advertisers to your blog, you should stat fixing issues on your blog and content engagement factors to improve your time on site.
8 tips to getting more repeat readers
Now, we’ve narrowly dealt with dwell time and why you should pay some amount of attention to it. It’s crazy to work hard on driving traffic without injecting in your blog the necessary energy to welcome and keep the visitors.
We know how tough it is to increase blog traffic. Greg has an article on different strategies to promote your blog. There are tons of blog posts out there on the topic of blog promotion and driving traffic.
But that’s just a phase of it all. Here are some tips to help you turn these visitors from different channels to permanent readers.
1. Get a memorable business name
Your name can make or break your business. A complex, difficult-to-pronounce blog name generally would make it difficult for readers to remember your address.
Because of fragile human memories, I will recommend you go in for short and memorable names and avoid confusing characters like hyphens in the name.
2. Be a real person
After over 6 years of blogging, I’ve discovered that people want to connect with others. When they can verify who you are and appreciate your work, it becomes easier to grab their attention and make them want to listen to you.
If you are a solo-blogger, having a clear about-me page that portrays your values as a person is crucial. For bloggers working as a team on one blog, it makes a lot of sense to have an about-page with brief bios of team members and contact details.
I have come across blogs whose about-pages are made up of simple write-ups about their vision and mission. Without a clear presentation of who is behind the blog, it freaks out some readers who would prefer a person-to-person relationship to simply being identified with your blog.
3. Capture their contact elements
The easiest way to get your readers coming back is to get back to them once they are away.
The best way to do this is to get them to give you their contacts or simply give you their consent to push a notification to their browsers each time a new post is published.
Here are three ways this functions:
- Get their email addresses to your Email Service provider
- Let them follow you on social media
- Get them signup to a browser notification app.
Getting the valid email addresses of your readers may sound easy but many have blogged for years without being email to build an email list of 1000 real people.
Creating a list of valid addresses submitted by real people is a hot and broad topic on its own. One of the articles you may want to check out is this on How to Significantly Grow Your Email List with a Lead Magnet
Social Media is on almost everyone’s lips in today’s content marketing world. But it’s still a hard task to get authentic results.
With a plethora of Social Media platforms getting users bewildered and confused, there is real need to get coached and trained by professional on this aspect.
Push notification is a browser subscription technology which allows you to push a notification to the browser of the reader each time a new post is published. Of course this is only possible if the readers consent to it by granting the required permission to the system.
4. Be consistent in content publication
Being consistent is a key factor to succeeding in blogging. The idea is to train your readers to expect more from you on daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Develop a content strategy that will not disappoint your subscribers. Once you have a publishing frequency, stick to it. At the same time, track and analyse your community response to your strategy. Make adjustment where necessary, avoiding big changes that may negatively impact your growth.
In my blog coaching activities, I have seen young bloggers mistake consistency for frequency but there are completely different factors. While frequency counts the number of articles you publish per given period, consistency is simply about sticking to the frequency.
If your frequency is two articles per week, consistency requires you hold tight to this rhythm for a long time.
5. Engage with your readers on your blog
If you are an interactive blogger, engaging with your readers on the comment section of your blog can be of strong assistance to build a bond and get them hooked.
As a full time blogger, commenting and engaging with my readers has seen my blog grow from a ghost town to a busy street. It’s not just about dropping a comment reply. There has to be an element of personal touch to your replies.
Make your commentators feel your personal attention to them and where necessary, invite them to sign up to your list or follow you on social medial for some extra advantage.
On several occasions when I stepped from the comment section to sending a private email to the commentators, I get to build warm business and friendly and beneficial connections. Think out of the box and use the comment section of your blog more judiciously.
6. Back to Dwell Time
We’ve spoken about dwell time earlier so you now know what it is. As a matter of fact, when readers stick around your blog for a little longer, chances for them to signup to your channels are high.
7. Give them reasons to signup
I have seen seemingly dead list building forms on some blogs. Some websites with relatively dull content having a boring signup form with no incentive.
The question that arises is why should I submit my email contact to his list?. You see, people somehow get to your blog but you fail to capture their contacts because you do not make it easy and attractive.
Attractiveness of a lead capture element is not the design. It’s about the reason you want my email. If there is some interesting free gift locked out behind the signup form, I will definitely want to submit my email.
One of the ways to do this with a massive dose of success is what we call content upgrade. In this strategy, you require the email address of your readers in order to give them access to an upgraded version of the content they are reading.
For instance, I may just convert this article to a pdf document or mp4 video file with some more benefits like promo codes mentioned in the video and lock it behind a signup form. You definitely would like to signup to my list in order to gain access to the pdf or video version of the post.
Content upgrade has proven to be great to build a super-targeted list of subscribers. Have you tried it before? Let me hear in the comment section.
8. Social Media Engagement helps retain readers.
It’s amazing how I have grown my email list from social media. Now, you have to know that many friends and followers on social media don’t even know about your blog.
Using #hashtag is a powerful strategy to gain more exposure on Social Platforms. The Social Media search engines function with hashtags to take your content to search results on these social platforms and social media apps.
A quick look at the hashtag #blackfriday gives us amazing results:
In the last few days, this term has become so popular on Social Media because of the season. Tweets and posts optimized for this term definitely will gain some extra exposure from social search.
This will be one of the reasons you get some more friends and followers who did not even know about your blog and email list. Engaging properly with this new set of Social Media users will end up driving a percentage of them to your blog and your email list.
Conclusion
Many bloggers have placed more energy on driving traffic and not being able to retain the readers. While this post is helping with some useful ideas to build an active community of hungry readers, I will recommend you think out of the box and add more to these points for your personal growth.
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