Tricks to Make a Blog Sticky

Blogging is one of the most important things that you can do online for your business. Whether you’re using a blog as the main website for your business, or you’re using it as a traffic building device for other websites you need to learn to craft great blog posts.

Blog posts can bring visitors into your website; visitors who will join your feed and participate with your site in the future. When you take the time to create blog posts that suck visitors in, you’ll have a great foundation on which to build your online business.

By paying attention to the quality of the blog you are creating and getting your audience involved, you’ll be able to create a community.

When you have a community, you have a ready market of buyers who will be more likely to purchase from you (or purchase your recommendations if you’re an affiliate marketer).

Not only does your blog need to create community but it needs to be sticky as well. A sticky blog is one where a first time reader arrives and finds it difficult to leave.

The following techniques are ways that you can make your blog or website more sticky.

1. Good Blog Design

Forget all those stupid bells and whistles, useless navigation and other such “novelties”. When you design your blog, bear in mind that you want people to visit your site several times a week, or maybe several times a day. Use lots of white space, easy color schemes, large(ish) text and clear headlines and links.

2. Put a tagline at the top of your blog that explains your focus.

This statement, displayed under the title of your blog, will give your new visitors an instant snapshot of what you’re about.

3. Make the sign up box for your RSS feed prominent.

One of the most important things to do is to have a prominent call to action for readers coming to your blog to subscribe to it.

4. Keep your content fresh and update your blog frequently.

When you think about it, each and every post you make is an opportunity to lose or keep visitors. Blog readers are fickle.

If you don’t provide them with something interesting and exciting to read, they will move on to the next blog on the same topic. You need to approach each blog post with enthusiasm and a plan.

5. Provide a Recent Posts List

The recent posts list allows users to track ongoing conversations much like you would in a forum. This is KEY to getting people to converse on your site. By facilitating that, a post you publish today, could still be active weeks from now.

6. Highlight Your Popular Content

A great way to convince readers to become loyal is to get them reading more than one of your posts (especially if they are your popular posts). You can do this by linking to other posts within your content but also suggesting further reading on popular posts around your blog.

7. Respond to Comments

This is a particularly effective way to draw readers back to your blog – particularly in the early days when you don’t have a lot of readers commenting to follow up.

There are two main ways you can do this:

• respond to comments with comments
• respond to comments with emails to the comment leaver

Showing those that comment on your blog that you’re interacting with them can make a real impression and will often draw them back time and time again.

What would you add? What have you done on your site to add stickiness?

Looking forward to hearing your ideas in comments below.

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• Put Your Bookmarking Efforts into Overdrive Using a Free Submission Interface
• 7 Quality Ways where You Can Advertise Your Blog for Free
• Advanced Tips on Using Articles As Your Ultimate Traffic Generator
• The Art of Using Blogs to Create Monthly Income
• RSS Directory Submission: The Simple and Effective Blog Promotion