In my series for 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge
- Joining The Challenge Of 31 Days To Build A Better Blog At Problogger.net! U2?
- What’s your Elevator Pitch?
- 9 Advantages Travelling Offline With Your Notebook!
- Continuing 31 Day challenge to Build a Better Blog
- Popular Websites And Their First Year Roundup!
- 6 Helpful Tips To Build A Better Blog!
- 7 Insightful Tips To Improve And Raise The Quality And Readership Of Your Blog
Today is the last time, that I summarize some informational and valuable tips by Darren Rowse, how you can improve your blog significantly.
1. To win new readers, pay attention to them, for example:
- Promote a comment of a reader in a future post
- Write a post about another blogger
- Give readers the oportunity to promote their blog
- Start a reader poll and highlight interesting answers in a follow up post
- Invite readers for guest posts
Why? Because you can turn occasional readers to loyal readers of your blog. Your reader will feel appreciated and have a better relationship to your blog.
More to read on his blog.
2. Call your readers to action
This is a common problem, passive readers. And it’s not easy to turn them to active readers. Some suggestions how you can involve your readers are shown here.
3. Ask your readers question! What can you expect:
- Readers get involved and leave a comment
- Readers are coming back more often to your blog, if they left a comment
- Posts with a central question can help to find out what you readers like to read about
- Answers of you readers can be an infinity resource for other readers
- You might get a lot incoming links, if readers are dealing with the question on their page.
- Good verbalized question can be a very positive effect for searchengines. Users who have the same question as you had, will probably end up on your blog
Some bloggers are avoiding a „question post“. Because they expect no or just a few answers.
Darren lists 11 tips, to get answers from your readers:
- The question should be relevant to your blog
- A question regarding to a previous popular post
- Ask a question your readers can answer easily and in few words
- Ask a question, your readers are also eager to know. Use their curiousity
- Suggest your readers some answers
- Either/ Or are good questions
- Use a poll tool with statistic function
- Controverse questions are always good, but be careful, can be dangerous
- Add your own answer or opinion to the question or write a follow up post
- Ask your readers for their help, they like to help you
- Write a follow up post with best answers
More informations about “question posts” are on Darren’s website.
4. Help to improve another blog
Every blogger would appreciate if you would help them to improve their blog with your tips and tricks and experiences. They pay you back thousand times. There are many ways to improve another blog:
- Write a guest post
- Leave an helpful and informational comment
- Link to other blogs
- Recommend another blog to your readers
- Inform the other blogger about helpful Plugins/Hacks for their blog
5. Search for dead links
If you have a blog for a longer time, you probably have some dead links on your website. Dead links have 2 negative aspects:
- On one hand, bad links lead your readers to an error page or irrelevant content and you lose the reader
- Additionally search engines are not very fond of dead links and you might receive penalties
For WordPress blogs I recommend Broken Link Checker or use www.dead-links.com.
6. Write a review
Reviews are mostly very successful. Many people looking for reviews and experiences about products or services on the internet before the buy it. Here are some ideas for reviews:
- Review a book
- Movie or TV-show
- Review of other websites in your niche
- Review about restaurants, if you blog about food
- Review about hotels, airlines and touristic places, if you have a travel blog
- Review about outfits, fashion and stars what they are wearing
- Write your opinion about a political speech, if you have a political blog
- Reviews of newest gadget, if you have a tech blog
- Review tools and products of your niche
- Review about a exhibition or gallery if you write about art on your blog
- Review toys if you have a parent blog
- Review about music instruments or music if your blog is about music
- Review about much, much more…
Tips to write a good review:
- Write your opinion, readers don’t need only specs, they also want to know about experiences and opinions of other users
- Rate the product/service
- Mention positive and negative aspects of the product/service
- Use keywords for SEO
- Compare products/services
- Mention for who this product/service is perfect for or not for
- Write in a personal style so people can identify easier them self with your review and your experience
- Use photos or even videos
- Let the reader know where they can get the product/service for a great price
More details are on Darren’s website.
7. Use analytic programs to find out what your readers are most interested in.
More information here
How do you turn your passive into active readers and what tips and tricks do you have to improve a blog?
Popularity: 1% [?]
Tags: Blog Tips, Build Better Blog, Tricks
June 9th, 2009 at 5:44 am
Some great tips there ive been looking through your site and have to admit it is ace. Really good website keep up the good work
June 9th, 2009 at 6:10 am
Hey nes, thank you very much for your copliment, hope you will check my blog more often.
December 1st, 2010 at 6:55 pm
Very useful information and it makes sense.
February 4th, 2011 at 10:50 am
Thanks for the tips and advice,I am going to use them, it takes so much time to write good content though.
February 4th, 2011 at 10:52 am
You have hit the nail on the head with this great info, I have looked at the rest of your blog and it all looks great.
March 1st, 2011 at 9:04 am
It seems to me very hard to build a decent blog with all the competition.