Feed

Sticky Readers

Posted on May 11th, 2007 in Traffic by Scott

Or More Precisely, Getting Your Readers To Stay

Nate over at Natewhitehill.com has a great recent post on Getting Your Readers To Stick.  Although each point is fairly common in itself, the compiled list of 7 ways to get people to stay on your site is extremely useful.

I am currently only doing 2 of the 7 suggestions!    

1) I have the related postsplugin going.  And since I installed that I saw a large increase in the number of pageviews per reader.  It shot up from around 1.3 to ~2.5.   Which is a great benefit for only having to install a single plugin in

2) I offer a full RSS feed.  I have recently added the RSS feed to my blog and made it more visible.  Since then I have gotten a couple of subscribers.  Which is great.  Happy reading you guys!

But what am I not doing?

3) My feed is not highly visible - Currently with this theme my feed is only shown in one place, along the top of the page.   In my next theme iteration I will change that to also be shown on the sidebar

4) I’m not asking people to subscribe - Being new to blogging, and especially to RSS, I haven’t yet gotten into the habit of asking my new visitors to subscribe to my feed.  I need to start doing that.

5) I’m not asking questions - Interaction with visitors is a key to a successful blog.  However so far on this blog the flow of information has been mostly one way.  I need to interact with my visitors more and ask questions which prompt comments.   Have any ideas for some good questions?

6) I’m not reachable - Still need to publish my e-mail    webmaster@savvyaffiliate.com …. and need to fill out that “About me page”   Right now my readers could be bursting with great suggestions for my site, and I wouldn’t know.

7) Not hosting any contests - Want to get people to come to your site?  Give something away for free.   I have given out this advice but haven’t taken myself up on it.   Sooner or later I’ll need to throw a contest.

So do you have any ideas on how I can get people to stick around longer?   Leave me a comment below

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