We all know that a website without visitors is like a lonely place, in fact I’d listed some important things to increase blog traffic earlier before. Retaining visitors on a blog or website is a bit tough but a required process. This can be done by attracting a large number of visitors and additionally converting that traffic into loyal or regular readers. Of course, quality content is the key to get visitors involved in your posts (must read tips to write effective blog posts), but there are more important things that you might be missing.

Increase Subscribers / Convert Visitors into SubscribersPeople often wonder how to increase Subscribers on blog or how to convert visitors into subscribers. You have heard about Traffic Bounce rate, which goes high when most of the visitors see the single page and left your site without browsing more pages. There are some simple ways through which you can convert the one-time visitors into loyal ones, hence lowering down the Bounce rate, hence you convert visitors into subscribers:

  1. Good Design: Good design and soothing color theme of a website or blog directly affects the mind of the visitors. They would like to spend more time on your site if it has a good and attractive design theme. So, you must focus on the design of your blog / website and should hire a good Designer for that.
  2. Engage your Readers: Provide useful links in and around your postings. For example, related posts in the post footer, popular and most viewed stories of your blog in the sidebar section, giveaway offers above the fold etc.
  3. Let them find Subscribe Options: Subscribing options lets your visitors to subscribe easily, if they wish to do so. Let them get subscribed via RSS as well as Email. Always put the Subscription Options above the fold, so that use can see them even without scrolling down the page.

    – Email Subscriptions: The best and free alternative to provide Email subscription facility on your site is Feedburner. Email Subscription helps you in building a good email list too. If you do not maintain an email list, you may lose your trusted and regular readers slowly and gradually, as the readers are required to be informed and updated to return to your blog. Building email list is the best option, as you can stay in touch with your subscribers, provide them automatic updates and contact them any time when you release a new product or offer at your website or write a new post for them on your blog or can promote your new e-book.

    – RSS Feeds: The modern way to easily distribute online content is known as Web feed or RSS feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication which is based based on XML, a widely used standard for textual information exchange between applications on the web. RSS feed allows subscription to regular updates, delivered automatically via a web portal or a news or RSS reader. It also makes it possible to display Blogs, News and Podcasts hedlines anywhere with any Web friendly device.

    – Follow Options: Provide the links where visitors can socialize with your blog. For example, the URL of Twitter account, Facebook Fan Page, RSS with some attractive icons. You should ask your Designer to get the task done for you.

    – Utilize Stats: If you have a good number of subscribers and followers of your blog, you can show their count, which also leaves a good impression of the visitors.

    – Ask your Readers: Give in a humble annotation in the ending of your blog posts, asking your visitors to subscribe. If you content has impressed your reader, 90% are the chances that s/he will subscribe.

  4. Offer rewards: You should make your subscribers happy by providing attractive offers, giveaways and rewards from time-to-time, getting them more involved in reading your site. Also let the deal or offer known to the normal visitors, who are not subscribers. This will make strong chances of get the new visitors subscribed in no time.
  5. Let them Contact you easily: Provide an easy way to contact you to the visitors of your site. The best way to do so is to give a Contact form including Name, Subject, Email and Message fields. You can make a separate page for it or can include the form in the footer itself. This is important as your readers can directly mail you about their personal queries and interests, eg. for Guest posts, Problems, Advertising, Publishing, Jobs etc.

The above given are very basic yet important things for webmasters which give strange results when implemented correctly. I hope you got the things you were missing through this post. Feel free to share your tips too.