The following tips will help you to manage your blog visitors effectively and run a successful blog.

This post on ‘managing your visitors successfully’ is the third part of the 5 part series on how to run a blog successfully.  This article discusses simple techniques that you can use to get the most out of visitors to your blog.

How to Run A Blog Successfully series consists of the following 5 parts:

• How to Set up your Blog
• How to Manage Your Blog Content
• How to Manage Visitors to Your Blog (Current Post)
• How to Use Social Media for Your Blog
• Internet Marketing for Your Blog

The last part of the series focused on ‘How to Manage Your Blog Content’. This article focuses on how to manage your visitors successfully.

How to Blog Successfully – Managing Visitors

The following tips focus on managing your visitors effectively, which is important to ensure your blog is successful.

1. Make it Easy for Readers to Share Your Content

Getting your readers to share your content is one of the most effective ways to promote your posts. In In addition to standard share button, include individual buttons for the main social sites that are most relevant to your blog. This will improve conversions.

2. Ensure Good Usability and Navigation

There are many ways to ensure good usability. The navigation should be clear and simple. Standard text menu is best for usability as well as search engine indexing. Large font  size, contrasting background, use of sufficient whit-space and clutter-free lay-out are common ways to ensure a usable and functional site.  If using ads,  try to keep them to a minimum and take steps to blend the ads into the content. Too many ads can interfere with the readability of content.

3. Hold a Contest or Give-away for Readers

Holding a contest and offering a prize to your readers is a popular technique to provide a boost to your blog traffic. You can promote the contest on social media. A good contest with useful reward can be appealing for users and has the potential to attract a lot of traffic to your blog.

4. Offer incentive to Boost Engagement on Your Blog

There are many ways to boost reader engagement on your blog. You can offer an incentive to customers to comment on your blog by displaying the top commentators on your homepage including a link to their site. Similarly, it is common for blogs to offer a free guide or e-book when they register for their newsletter or subscribe to their feed. You can also take advantage of  various WordPress plug-ins to boost engagement.

5. Offer incentive to Boost Engagement on Social Media

You can also offer an incentive to boost social engagement. The example below shows how In-Time, a Watch Repair Company in UK encourage customers to participate on Facebook by displaying special offers only to customers who join as fans (by using Facebook’s like button).

I have even come across blogs donating a certain amount to a charity if certain number of Facebook Likes or ReTweets were achieved within before a particular charity event.

6. Use Effective Call to Action to Encourage Conversions

Call to action refers to links, buttons or other elements that encourage users to perform desired action. Effective use of call to action is vital to run a successful blog. You should take steps to improve conversions through effective call to action. This can be anything from signing-up for a newsletter or sale of a product or service. Make sure relevant call to action is displayed on all pages in a prominent position.

7. Make it easy for Readers to Contact You

Make it easy for readers to contact you on your blog. Try to offer multiple ways to contact you e.g. enquiry form, telephone, postal address or through social media. Display contact details clearly. Try to include a link to contact page on your main menu. It is important for credibility. If you offer advertising, use a dedicated page to target advertises and perhaps a form for advertising enquiries.

8. Offer Multiple Ways for Readers to Connect with You

Successful blogging is all about forming connections and relationships with users. You should offer multiple ways for your readers to connect with you. RSS feed, Newsletters are standard with most blogs. In addition, use multiple social channels including Facebook, Twitter, etc for readers to connect with you or receive blog updates. Promote this on your site. It is easy to syndicate content from your blog to various social sites avoiding the need to manually update the networks each time you add a new post.

9. Monitor Visitor Statistics Closely

It is also important to measure the growth of your blog take necessary steps to improve the user experience.  You can track your bounce rate of pages and make improvements to reduce bounce rate on pages that have a high rate . You can also keep track of which sites drive the most traffic and focus more on those sites to improve traffic. Similarly, you can also keep track of average page views and take steps to improve retention. Successful blog constantly work on refining their website based on statistics.

Summary:

The techniques discussed in this article will help you to manage your visitors effectively. There are many other factors need to be considers in order to run a successful blog.  This is the 2^nd part of the 5 part series on ‘How to run a blog successfully’. The next part will focus on how you can use social media effectively to promote your blog.