Increase Your Blog’s Reader Retention and Interest

Joel’s note: I’ve very happy to introduce a guest post from Dwight Anthony of Financially Elite Blog.

By now you may be asking yourself just what is reader retention and how can I captivate more interest on my blog? If you aren’t familiar with reader retention, it’s the notion of once readers hit your blog that you keep them fascinated and provide a good experience once they are there. Once you increase reader retention then you usually also increase further interest from your readers, as it’s usually a complementary relationship.

The goal of every blog owner should be to increase the time a reader visits their site as it can help with building authority in your blog and the reader continues to read your content and become more immersed in your overall message.

This makes for a more quality reader that will most of the time result in more signups to your RSS, subscription newsletter, products and so forth because you have given the visitor more value with the visit.

Good quality retention of your readers will also lead to less ‘bouncebacks’ or readers hitting your site, not quite liking what they see and leave your site possibly for good. You literally only have seconds to initially gather the interest of a visitor and convert them to a loyal reader of your blog. What is the best way for you to measure these very important metrics of traffic visiting your blog? You don’t have to look any further than using a free online traffic analyzer like Google Analytics.

There are quite a few paid options as well, but Google Analytics is possibly the widest used. What kind of valuable metrics that you can measure with Analytics? Here are just a few options:

• Track Your Traffic Sources. Analytics will allow you to track exactly where your traffic comes from. For example, I can usually tell where the majority of my traffic comes from in a given period – if it comes from organic search or even Facebook or Twitter.
• Track your Bounce Rates. See exactly how long visitors are staying on your site and see where you can improve on this.
• Find what Keywords are Working. You will be able to tell just what your best performing keywords were in the time period for your blog.
• Set Goals to Hit. With Analytics, you can set goals that can send you alerts when you hit a particular goal. For example, you can set a goal to alert you when your traffic reaches a certain daily amount and many other goal options.

These are just a few ways that you can measure what visiting traffic is doing on your site. A few other quick tips on getting that visitor stay rate increased would be:

• Make Your Site Visually Appealing. Nothing is worse than a site that doesn’t have visual appeal. This can hurt a site allowing users to prematurely go somewhere else. Hire a good designer or pickup a book on web design fundamentals.
• Give Your Readers Interactive Options. A poll in the sidebar, a Facebook reader display option, popular post, blogroll, best commenter are just a few of the many options you can implement to capture reader interactivity and keep them on your blog and interested.
• Offering a Free Resource. Long term planning for getting repeat visitors to your blog would be to offer them a free resource with an email optin building your email list for building a relationship with your audience.
• Always Offer an RSS Signup. This is possibly the most basic of blog design and is almost required these days as your visitors are looking for an RSS signup button or link on your page to get your feed.

I hope you enjoyed these quick and easy ways that you can convert those casual visitors to loyal readers on your blog. Please make sure to leave a comment and I will make sure to answer them.