No blog can exist without its visitors. Nobody would deny this. Therefore it´s vital for your blog to keep visitors coming back over and over again. These visitors will do this for one reason: fresh content. You traffic will probably drop down to zero if people come and still see the same old content they saw on every recent visit. Most of them would stop checking your site for updates.
Here are some tipps on what you can do to create more content and even better content:
Write a series of posts
People love series of posts. This post is also part of a whole series of 25 posts and even though this is the second part of the series, I see some growth on RSS-Subscribers. I am expecting these numbers to rise even higher during the course of the 25 articles.
If you want to start a series on your blog, try to do what I did. I published a post announcing the series and put an index of all planned articles in it. This will not only help you achieve your goals, you won´t have to create ideas for new posts for a while as you now have a list of topics to write about. It will also get your readers to know what to expect from you within the next weeks and many of them would bookmark the index post or subscribe to your RSS-Feed and comeback often to check for the next part of your series.
Rewrite old articles
This advice will only work, if your blog has grown somewhat older, at least a year or better more. At that time you might have a really huge archive of posts you´ve written in past months. Some of them will have been more successful than other. Why not take one of these old, successful posts your readers loved in the past and recycle it?
Even though probably nobody would remember you post word to word, you should spend some time and change it. Maybe you could add a new angle to the topic or adjust your statements to the present situation. This adds more value to the post for your readers, and the search engines.
Avoid grammar mistakes
Of course, nobody is perfect. We all make mistakes all the time. But please spend one or two extra minutes to spell-check you post before hitting the publish button. It´s so easy and it really makes your reader feel a lot more comfortable while reading what you spend hours on writing.
I guess, you can find grammar mistakes on my blog for sure, even though I spell-check them every time before publishing, but I do my very best as I am not a native english speaker. I would appreciate discrete hints when you spot such typos.
Some popular spelling mistakes, I stumble upon very often:
their / there
Wrong: I will meet you their!
Right: I will meet you there!
Wrong: Have you seen there new car?
Right: Have you seen their new car?
i.e. / e.g.
Wrong: You could use a blog-cms (i.e., WordPress)
Right: You could use a blog-cms (e.g., WordPress)
i.e. means “that is” and e.g. means “for example”. A comma is always following them. OK, I will stop this language whiz behaviour now, you get the point.
Use attractive headlines
People like reading stories on topics they are intrested in. You could try to find some keywords on actual trends in public discussions. When it´s election time, is there any way to get the word election in your headline? People will perform many, many searches with this words around election day.
Of course you are not supposed to put it into your headline if it does not fit your content. But sometimes there are occasions you can use this.
Second, questions as a headline does always work well. This enables you to catch your readers into the conversation. Newspapers are using this technique almost everyday and they know why. Often you don´t want to reveal the conclusion of your article in the headline yet. Use an open question instead won´t tell people the results of your research before they read the article.
Top 10, Top 5, Top 100 lists are also always attracting visitors. It even works with a Top-11-list, what I tried a while ago with 11 ways to build links to your blog. Please read it for even more information on driving traffic to your blog.
Interlink other posts on your blog
Interlinking your posts will work for you for two reasons. Your readers are provided more and more detailed information on the topic and search engines will find links to other articles from within relevant content. Both should serve you well.
I will get to this more deeply later in this series. Don´t miss it.
This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.
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October 11th, 2007 at 8:04 am
I can see one potential danger in the approach you have taken in your series of traffic posts. You have built up an expectation in your readership which is in effect a promise to them that you will deliver. If you can, that’s great but if people come back to the original series and still keep seeing lots of blank spaces (or non linked titles) they may be disheartened.
Also, I think people are less likely to link to an unfinished series. In instead you only published the series post itself once you had a few posts in it, people might start linking to it and then you can add more posts over time as you see fit without imposing any pressure on yourself and all the while making your series more valuable.
October 11th, 2007 at 9:47 am
Caroline, I indeed wanted to make it a promise to my readers. The 25 posts of the series will be post on a 2-day rythm until the end. I have seen a huge increase in subscriber numbers, so I guess many people are waiting for the content and I wanted them to know, what to expect.
October 12th, 2007 at 1:23 am
No doubt that quality content placed on the site on a regular basis is essential and sometimes you need to motivate yourself to keep writing when you don’t want to. A series is good as long as you follow through. There is so much to write about…the problem is motivating yourself to actually do it consistently.
October 12th, 2007 at 2:58 am
Having published a list of scheduled posts already does really motivate me to go through it. I don´t know, if I would be able to stay on track if I only had planned to post these 25 for myself. It really helps, not only me but also the readers - they know what´s coming up.
October 19th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
I do like a reading series of posts, but you definitely need to do some planning and brainstorming to make it fit together properly.
November 3rd, 2007 at 3:18 am
Yeah, for some reason series seam to attract people. I immediately subscribed to your feed after reading one post in the series.