How To Keep People Interested In Your Blog

OK so you now have a blog…How do you keep people coming
back?

A key factor to attracting a lot of regular visitors is keeping people interested in your blog. It doesn’t matter whether your blog is a business blog, a personal blog or just a “My Dog Has Fleas” blog.  If it boors them until their skull shatters they more than likely won’t be coming back for more of the same. Many blogs have died and gone to bloggie heaven because people have lost interest.

The main reason for the lack of interest is usually just a lack of posts by the blogger. Regular, frequent posting, which will also boost your blog’s ranking in search engines, is essential to the survival of any blog.

“So Dave, what exactly is frequent posting, you ask?  What are the reasons for me to post frequently? How many blog entries should I make on a given week? How do I make frequent consistently good posts? How do I know what to write?”

Well, don’t fret my pretty…soon you will put on the ruby slippers and all things pertinent will be revealed to you, right here, in this post, on the electric internet.

What is frequent posting?

Frequent blog posting is posting enough to keep your readers interested. Duh! Well exscuuuse me…I have to make this simple enough for my homies back there in Rogue River, Oregon to understand.  You see, in Rogue River they don’t even have elevators…much less ones that go all the way to the top floor.

Obviously, people will not want to come back to a blog that hasn’t been updated in months. They want to see consistent posting so that they know coming back to check the blog next week to see if there are more posts won’t be a waste of time.

How many blog entries should I make each week?

Now you’ve got to ask me the tough questions, huh!  This is a tough one to answer. It really depends on the purpose of your blog. If it’s a personal blog, a weekly or twice weekly update is an excellent idea. A political, sports, music or religion blog should have 3-4 posts per week. Business blogs should have at least 2 posts, but preferably 4 each week.

“But Dave, I don’t see you posting 4 times a week!”  I know, I know, I was just about to explain that.

You see, the thing to remember is that quality counts. Posting frequently just for the sake of posting frequently tends to result in subpar posts which people won’t care about. Why create 4 poor quality posts each week when you could post 2 quality posts per week?  It is important to find a balance—frequent, quality posts that won’t result in burnout. I mean what good would my brilliant mind be doing you if I was hiding in a closet with a gun in my mouth? Kapish?

How do I create quality postings on a consistent basis?

It’s all about following a consistent pattern of writing. Maybe you’re not a natural writer and this is difficult. That’s why we’ll give you an outline to help you.

1.       Pick a topic that is interesting to you and to your readers.  Maybe if your blog is a sports blog, you could write about the latest happenings with steroid influence in Major League Baseball.  Don’t write about something most people wouldn’t be interested in like steroids influencing the outcome of the arm chair luge championship.

2.       Carefully think about what it is about the topic that you’ll write. It’s easy to make quality blog postings if you know exactly what you’ll write. Plot out everything about the post even before you begin to write it.

3.       Before writing your content, pick out some keywords that are relevant to your blog. If you use keywords throughout your post in a natural way, you will please search engine spiders resulting in getting your blog ranked higher on search engines. Your visitors won’t mind the use of keywords if they are used in a tasteful, sensible way. 

4.       Begin writing your post. Don’t limit yourself to a particular amount of words. Just do what comes natural. And if any blog post is hard for you, just take a timeout and relax. You should be able to finish the post a bit later on, after you’ve had some time to think things through, you should be able to finish the post with no problems.

5.       Don’t try to be Shakespeare, write like you talk…in a natural conversational way. That’s the secret to good writing…ala Hemingway, Mark Twain or Stephen King..

So frequent blog posting can be an easy task as long as the person who is posting takes the time to plot out what they’ll write about.  Take a few minutes to think about your post and then just do it!

Why is frequent posting important?

Gaining and maintaining visitors isn’t the only reason to post often in your blog. Catching the eye of a search engine—and achieving a high ranking—is another valid reason for posting frequently. Make sure each posting in your blog features some keywords or keyword phrases scattered throughout it. Logic says that the more natural keywords you have on a blog, the better.  Thus, the more posts you make on your blog, the more keywords you have on there. And the more keywords you have, the more likely a search engine bot is to crawl your site. The more your site is crawled by bots, the more likely it is that you will have a high ranking on a search engine.  High search engine ranking means higher traffic and after all, whatever reason we are blogging for…we are all after traffic.

Live the Dream,

Dave Carter