If you want to keep visitors interested in your content, you have to get them involved. You don’t necessarily have to get them involved by commenting on your posts, or your content, you can of course get them talking about what interests them. You can use Chat plugins for your blog, or forums – you can even separate all these things and have a multi-function blog. However, one seriously good method of keeping visitors coming back, is by allowing them to rate certain topics or conversation points in your posts. There are various tools set up now whereby you can add rating systems into your post (contextually), and further add functionality to your posts.
When you are writing about Google and a cool SEO method, you could simply add in these little tooltip features, where they encourage the visitor to comment on Google, or on SEO.. or anything else in the post. A website called
Blippr is getting a lot of attention from the big blogs like Mashable etc. and they are growing rapidly. They will insert small smileys in the content of your post, next to the words you specify. People can then leave their opinion about the topic. When you allow visitors to do something like this, they feel part of the blog, and part of its upkeep. This means they will more thank likely return, and continue adding to the blog’s content in true Web 2.0 style.
You could of course simply allow visitors to rate your posts. Rating System allows you to add a five star review feature at the footer of each post, and this can be beneficial to both you and your visitors. They will see a highly rated topic on your site and want to read it, and furthermore get involved. This will pay dividends in future residual traffic.
Written by Andrew Fitzgerald - Make Money Blogging
try to fix every little error you come across. If you do this, you will be forever changing your site, and that is just not possible or viable. If you want to have a quick look at how your site is viewed on other browsers, simply go to Browser Shots and take a look. As you can see, there are a few little differences – but don’t let it get you down. Chances are, the browser user is used to this problem, and it will not detract from your content. Unless of course it is something major – and then you may want to fix it. Once you have checked that most popular browsers can actually see your content, it is necessary to speed up your site. The latest craze in blogging is Lazy Loading. This involves installing a small amount of Javascript to your site, so that as the user scrolls down the page, they have images loading, rather than waiting for the page to load all the images at once. This is a cool concept, and ideal for those still on dialup, or just for people who want to make sure their site loads very fast indeed. Another way to make your site visitor-proof, and have happy surfers on your website, is to allow them to let their hair down. Some great blogs and websites now offer a ‘Just for fun’ area or ‘Random’ pages on their sites. This creates an air of relaxation and reminds people that they are able to enjoy the internet as well as use it for work. If you put an area on your site that has funny images, videos, games or anything light-hearted, you will certainly see traffic to those pages.
because they will follow links through to your site, and that steady stream of traffic will keep returning week after week. You must never over-market this list either. It is generally not a good idea to send out offers to them at all until you have had them as members for a long time, receiving free information and such. WordPress does not have this built in as standard, so you have to be creative and use plugins, or at least use AWeber or a similar autoresponder that can send out offers at a time you specify.
recommendations made by other blog owners, to their loyal readers. Therefore the readers are much more inclined to click the links. When you see names in comment boxes, you are not as likely to click, and likewise, forum signatures that will never be used in actual posts will never be clicked. They are just SEO fodder, and of course – Google can smell this a mile off if you overdo it. A good way to get your site about in actual communities, is to use the new toolbars that are popping up all over the net. These toolbars have “gadgets” and links on them, such as checking the weather, playing games and more. Another thing you can do, is promote your website on these toolbars, which have millions of users, and appear on thousands of websites. The basic theory is this. You create you blog, and then you go to a company like Conduit who allow you to create your own gadget, which will appear on these toolbars all over the internet, on webmasters’ websites. As long as you are related to their blog or website, they will have your gadget on that toolbar. And as long as you have great content – you will get webmasters using your site as a gadget. If you are getting related traffic to your site, from possibly higher ranking websites, then this can only mean you will retain these visitors over a long period. You will also never have to pay for this traffic, and of course the traffic is viral. Other webmasters will see your link, and possibly add to their toolbar. As new webmasters sign up for the Conduit platform, your site will appear on more and more sites – this is due to your gadget having a user count. The more popular you get, the more people want you on their toolbar.
certainly be the one who gets a lot of traffic. People respect others who help people out, and if you can be that guy – then you will get the traffic. All you need to do is look for the questions that people are asking the most, and then go and research the product/service. You can usually find answers on places like Yahoo! Answers or Wikianswers. There’s also millions of online blogs. If you are willing to do the digging, and you enjoy helping people, this could end up being your sole source of traffic. A lot of people get traffic daily by helping people like this. If you get a reputation for being the forum’s ‘go to guy’, people are more likely to take what you say as authoritative, and any link you post will be followed. This is a good place to be.
more and more from a webmaster now, than ever before. Usually, it’s content. Content can make or break a site, and the only real longevity a site ever gets is from unique regular content being added, and Google seeing this happen over a length of time.
daily with unique content, and being totally collaborative content. Personal homepages became increasingly popular on the internet, and some of the first web logs, online diaries, and journals began to gather steam, such as Blogger and Open Diary. From here, the blogs began to evolve into huge Multi User or personal CMS websites.
