How to engage readers to your blog?

To add to the woes, Google's friend connect takes a long time to load and it hits the performance of blogs. Same with Facebook fan widget too..

By writing well, and maintaining regularity?

Absolutely. That is a must. Apart from that I am looking for ways to keep even one time visitors to keep engaging.

The question then becomes what sort of a community are you looking to attract and maintain? If it is a community of reasonably like-minded people who care about similar things, the following is what has worked for me over the years:

• I've written quite a bit.
• I've spent quite some time on other people's sites (whose content or lives are interesting to me), and foster discussions through comments and e-mail.
• I write the occasional provocative piece just to rile people up and get them to participate. This is evil and I do not endorse this.

Today, (according to google analytics) I have about 300 visitors that have visited my site over 200 times in the last year. I just realised that (apart from the transient traffic) these many people show up once every two days. It's funny that so many people take time out of their lives to keep up with my boring existence!

hmmm good thoughts. Well, i have more than 1000+ unique visitors a day with twice that number of page views. I am looking at multiplying those numbers now :)

Right, but if I understood you correctly, you're interested in building a strong, loyal community. So 'Visitor Loyalty' is the variable you should be keeping an eye on in Google Analytics, not (just) Pagviews. Everytime you make a change (such as the any of the ones suggested by anyone here), monitor the loyalty variable over a couple of weeks and see if more of your readers moves toward more repeat visits.

It is easy to forget that 2000 pageviews a day can quickly go to naught if that reader base is transient. Once you get enough people in that 201+ visit category, you can be reasonably sure you have them hooked and they're going to come back no matter what (like one not posting for a couple of weeks because they're out having a baby or whatever).

Yes, i just implemented next and previous post navigation before and after the post content. Hope this helps readers to some extent. Thanks for your views Pundit. Appreciate it very much.

Hey I joined a great community where bloggers comment on each others posts. Hoever this ones girls only :(

www.sitsgirls.com

But I am sure hoards of communities out there do the same. ask around and join!

And ofcourse, write well, write regularly! (look whos sayin! :P)

hmm that is interesting! Wish there exists one such site without any gender bias!! Thanks for the info. Will explore more :)

I think Facebook fan pages are nice. I created one for my blog on a whim & it's keeping my regular readers/friends hooked (I think!)

But I personally think the simplest way is writing good posts that would make the visitors want to become regular ways. Besides that there is no foolproof way. 

I would love to go with that facebook fan pages... but my concern is only about the performance as it starts loading all those js and images! I am certainly not looking for easy fooling methods.. i really want to build on a good community.

I use facebook fan box too but in my case i found it quite effective. Every post and update on my blog comes on fb and twitter and all people who like the post click on the link and read it. I also installed chatroll, a widget with which i can chat directly with my readers and get feedback from them. Take a look at my blog: http://adityasmoviereviews.blogspot.com/

Yes, that seem to be a good option. Let me try it out on my blog too.

Mohan, i suggest you go with proper positioning of navigation menus. That makes a hell lot of diffeerence.

Thanks  for your suggestion. I have modified the header with categories list as well as post navigation menus.

Thanks to everyone who took their time out to put forward their thoughts.. if anyone is still willing to share something new, feel free to do so.

Ok folks, now the changes I made are giving the results already!!! Page views per user has gone up from 1.7 to 2.1 now!!!

Hi Mohan,

I need a favour from you.

Kindly ping me back in Indiblogger at "http://www.indiblogger.in/forum/topic.php?id=3470"

I am new to Indiblogger, no clue how it works.

Awaiting your reply.

Regards,

RamyaSadasivam,

Make Money Online

Welcome to indiblogger!

Here is a site where you can check out a few stats. Such as: Google Page Rank (the higher the better) and Alexa Traffic Rank (the lower the better)

http://www.rankwidget.com/

But how does that help your visitors to keep coming back?

I believe in the quality of your content and the clarity of thoughts - that's all that should keep your readers patronized to your good blog!

http://shindeneeraj.blogspot.com

Can't agree more though!

i came here to comment on the topic......................post reading the posts  ..................i've come to know what a kid i am in blogosphere! its like walked in a PG lecture room to deliver a lecture, but as i entered i realized i still need to pass my high school! let alone take a lecture! i dare say i'm 'prepared' enough to pass the high school test now!

thnx everyone!

Be happy that you got so much of information without actually need to learn it the hard way :) Welcome!

@mohan

thnx for this topic.. i've realised i have a lot to learn..

You'r most welcome to join the bandwagon of learning & sharing the experience!

Engaging readers to your blog involves various steps. Firstly and most importantly, we need to keep in mind that 'Content is King'! If your writing can stop people in their tracks, then you are game. For instance, Mohan, your blog is filled with fantastic content and am sure you must be having a large readership...

Besides this, the content should also be reader-friendly. As in, no hi-fi, sophisticated English please. Keep it simple so that readers can make out of a blog. Also, we need to take care of those small tweaks here and there with formatting so that the content is easily scannable with bold, italics and other font configurations.

Now, if the content is all set, here comes the part of asking people to read it. That is, in other words, attracting quality traffic. For that, you can ask your family, friends and relatives to read it first. Then slowly and steadily, you can start promoting your key posts on social networking sites and other stuff.

If I am not mistaken, keeping readers engaged also includes having an active comments section with lively discussions. For that, I usually ask some of my friends to comment first on a new post. And then slowly, others join in. I do have engaging debates with my readers, which actually enriches the whole blogging experience. And it's fun, too!

This is all what I've learnt through my blogging experience of a little over a year now. And I must say that a learnt some really interesting things in this forum topic. Thanks for starting it, Mohan!

I have been trying to create a decent reader community too but haven't been successful yet.