Blog Ranking (part 4) - How to value your audience

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Every blogger needs to find a way of attracting visitors.
What's the point in writing good articles when there's nobody reading them? Specifically, considering the high number of blogs and bloggers, it is fairly easy to understand how hard is being noticed, if not almost impossible. Established blogs have many advantages such as a wide audience with loyal readers, a high visibility due to the fact that they are already well ranked, they have always new proposing writers and so they can publish articles even more than once a day and so on. That is like a big wheel: a blogger needs to work hard to set it in motion, but once that it is spinning, it is probably more difficult to stop it than to make it run faster.
Visitors
It is clear that the first target for a new blogger is to increase the hits number. Visitors will eventually start to flow, have a look around, hopefully find a solution or a good hint and then go away. Someone will subscribe to the rss feed, someone might even leave a comment (that is more difficult - if I may say so), however when a quite good hit ratio is consolidated, what the blogger needs is to keep visitors on the site. A blog is a place where people come and go, especially for a blog like The Web Thought, where they might find solution to immediate issues and don't care about the rest. Probably if they find more than one solution, than they might decide to visit the blog more often (just to see what's new). But again, it is the wheel problem: it so difficult to make it spinning.
Keep your readers
There are different way to keep your readers on the blog.
The first and easy thing to do - in my opinion - is to use a target="_blank" in your outside link. Do not open a linked page in your blog window, because that will definitely make your visitor go away.
Make articles interesting and easy to read. Most of web surfers don't bother reading long articles. They prefer to get to the interested point. For instance using paragraphs will help them to find what they are looking for and skip what is superfluous.
Create a list of links to related posts in your blog, or - if you dare - in other blogs. In order to do so you can use different widgets for Blogger or Wordpress. I use "Smarter related posts widget for Google Blogger" which I found quite good.
When you are so lucky to have people commenting your article, always read what they have to say and answer (either thanking or writing what you think). Building some sort of relationship with your readers is very important. That will make them come back or subscribe to your feed. It is not like we are talking about a bunch of mindless and stupid people here. They will value your help and/or kindness, like we all do. Feedback is important to them like it is important to you (Not to mention that the eventual relationship will make you grow a lot professionally).

That's all folk for now.
Have a splendid day.