A big part of building a successful blog is user engagement – having loyal readers who comment and return to your site. These readers will help to keep your site active, create discussions and the more you appeal to them so too will your user base grow. There are several tips to increasing the feedback and engagement you get from readers, which I will discuss below.

Tip 1: Comments

Make sure your site is comment friendly! This doesn’t just mean having a comment form on your blog posts (but is of course a neccessity), but also asking questions to your readers like their opinions or experiences about a topic.

Also keep in mind that you can offer your users a kickback for commenting by linking to their website in your comments. Consider not using rel=”nofollow” tags on the comments to entice them. Also remember to reply to comments, whether you are simply saying “nice comment” or responding to questions they had – engaging your users will keep them coming back.

Then an important tip is to use a plugin which allows users to subscribe to comment updates per post, such as the one on this blog. If a user has commented chances are they will want to be told when someone replies; and this is an easy way to get users to return to you.

Tip 2: RSS

Make your RSS subscription options obvious – use services like Feedburner which allow users to subscribe to your blog via email. RSS is an easy way of getting your posts out to the internet and attracting users. Also keep in mind that users reading your posts through RSS need a reason to come to the site – ask them questions like I’ve said above, and they’ll be coming in to comment.

Tip 3: Bolding

iMod recently posted a great tip which may seem pretty simple, but can really make a difference: bolding. The idea behind it is that you bold a relevant sentence on the 4th of 5th line of a blog post. This will draw in a users attention, and help get them to read and engage your post.

Tip 4: Quality Content

There is unfortunately no excuse for quality content – users who know you write long, useful posts are more likely to come back to you than people who think you are running a splog. If you want to build users write about topical content that is likely to continue interesting them, and before you know it you’ll be on their favourites list.

Tip 5: Advertising

While we advertise on our blog, there is a fine line between making some money and detering users which is all too easily crossed. It is true that embedding ads in your content, popunders and such get higher earnings and click throughs – but they also cause your blog to have less return readers. Don’t make it look like a splog if you are after a long, growing community as opposed to a quick buck.

I hope you’ve taken in some of my suggestions, and if you have any others (as I’ve said before) please let us know!

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