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.

WordPress themes are generally free. The creators of themes usually ask that their link remain intact at the footer of the screen on every page so that anybody who likes it can click through, and possibly buy premium themes from the theme developers. More often than not, free themes will have exactly the same features as premium themes, so there’s no real need to pay out silly money on something that works just as good for free. The WordPress site itself has many free themes by enthusiastic developers, and every day new themes are added. The main thing to consider is what type of content you are going to be publishing, so it fits in well with the design.

Magazine type sites, like this one, provide an area for featured content, as well as normal content. Also, you will see video categories, linked from the home page. Featured content is ideal for any posts you create that are monetized. You want to channel as much home page traffic to the featured area of your site as possible, so an attention grabbing image with text is required. Magazine style sites work well for media rich content, but if you just have text based information on your site, with the occasional image, then you may want to look into Journal type themes. These provide you with basic post layouts, that have a large header, and good sized post pages. If you want a graphically rich website, then you need to look more into premium themes, because these will have an animated home page, usually, and large linked areas to featured content.

For the most part, magazine type themes are the ideal solution for most bloggers, as you can add and remove functionality depending on your needs. You do not have to have the video section linked from the home page, and you only need to display the content you want.