Contacting your blog readers

Day 5 of the problogger.net blog improvement challenge asks people to get in contact with users that visit your site, have registered or commented on a post. The overall aim is of course to try and build community, the word I hear thrown around more than anything across the Internet. Creating a working community is one of the hardest things to do in my opinion, forums are such fragile eco-systems at times which can breakdown quickly depending on the kind of publishing techniques you use.

Anyway back to contacting users, to be honest I think I’ll struggle as I’ve only had very limited blog comments here. I will however go to the sites of all the people that have recently left a comment and return the favour. As this site doesn’t have any kind of forum it’s also going to be impossible to contact everything through a newsletter. Currently for reference this site is getting in the region of 400 – 500 unique visitors a month, not massive I know but growing month on month which is good.

I think I’ll leave you with some tips that you should try to focus on if you currently have a larger site or yours is just starting out.

• As I said above, make sure you visit the website of everyone that has commented on your site and return the favour. Sharing links and building a relationship will be highly beneficial if you strike up conversion over email etc.
• Another great tip is to reply to all comments directly on your blog like I’ve done here, not only does this provide some instant contact with the user leaving the comment but lets the search engines know that people are actively participating on your site. As I mentioned the other day, user engagement is now being monitored by search engines through Internet browsers (Google uses Chrome and MSN uses IE8) to help position search result rankings. Another highly important activity then if you want to bring more users into your site.

Darren notes two very important points:

Loyal Readers Spread the Word - I’ve found that in many cases a single reader quickly becomes numerous loyal readers because when you make an impression on people it’s likely that they’ll spread the word about you. They do this through their own blogs, word of mouth, Twitter and other social networking sites.

Loyal Readers Build Page Views - One loyal reader can potentially view your blog hundreds (if not thousands) of times. A daily visit from that reader for a year brings an extra 365 page views to your blog. Gain an extra loyal reader every day for a full year and the numbers start to add up.

If you don’t currently have any comments across your site then go and visit or blogs in your niche and comment on posts. Just make sure that whatever you say is relevant so the site owner is more likely to return to your site and return the favor. This is a great way of building your traffic and exposing your site to people in your niche.