5 Quick Ways to Enhance your Blog and Boost Visitors

Recently I talked to a friend about his blog. He was happy with the content and interactions, but felt like the crowd watching his blog had grown stagnant and he wanted to expand his reach for his blog. Looking it over, I had some quick suggestions that he could implement immediately.

1. Limit Article Content in Email Subscriptions
I subscribe to his email updates, and get the full article in my email. Due to this situation, I rarely actually visit his site to read articles (and thus my status as an active reader would not be recorded by analytics for metrics).

So I suggested that he configure his articles so that only an introductory paragraph goes out to email subscribers, with a 'Read More' link in order to bring readers back to the actual article to read on his blog. This way more readers are recorded as visitors, and readers can be encouraged to interact more.

2. CTA - Call to Action
One of the first things that he noticed about me was that I wasn't commenting on his articles (I was reading articles in email). While the articles were written well written and meaningful, the reader was not directed to do anything.

A question should be posed at the end of each article, encouraging the reader to share their impressions. Often the more provocative the question the better. This is a way to better engage your readers and make the post more interactive.

3. A Bit of SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a huge area to learn and implement in a website and can be overwhelming, but there a few steps that can be taken to tap into this side of web promotions.
Tags and Categories based on keywords. When the keywords used have been researched for popularity and competitiveness, then they can be leveraged and hopefully used like a magnet to pull in new followers.

A good tool for evaluating keywords is the Google Keyword Tool (usually associated with AdWords)
The tags that were being associated with the posts in the blog seemed to have been chosen at random, and none of the articles had been associated with categories.

By putting in the time to research a bunch of keywords tools like tags and categories can be leveraged more effectively.

4. Visibility
Maybe I am missing something, but I found it difficult to find articles on his site. The site was set up where the current blog article was the star, and all other posts faded away. The only way to see previous content was through a small list on the right sidebar for 'Recent Posts' (with just 3 links) and the 'previous' button on top of the article. There were no lists by months, or categories.

Also more cross linking is important (especially embedding the links on specifically keywords). By internally linking to other content on your site, you can help keep your readers on your site longer, encouraging them to read more of your stuff, perceiving it as related to a current article. Also internal linking helps SEO by giving the search engine a way of evaluating the hierarchy of your site, by seeing which articles have more internal links.

5. Promoting Others
It is great to do guest blogs on your site. This kind of cross-content development offers a chance for greater exposure and wider promotions, where your guest blogger can also be a content evangelist for your site as well.

Some common issues I see with the guest blogger: in the title of a guest blog, don't write "Guest Blog - Always Dry Your Towel".

This kind of title provides a clue to readers that they should treat this information differently than your usual posts, and undermines the potential for synergy from the guest post. Rather, you should be more aggressive in promoting your guest blogger, with a title like "Jerry Addams Says Why You Should Always Dry Your Towel", then indicate as a subtitle to the author name at the beginning of the article that this is a guest blog.

Also, to get the attention of others bloggers in your ecosystem, you can write articles (really reviews) about their blogs and how you have been following them and what you like about them.