Every blogger wants to have loyal readers. But how to change your first time visitors into devoted readers or even subscribers of your blog?
I’ll tell you one secret – writing killer articles is not enough today. It’s especially important these days – we have a lot of bloggers and tons of blogs, which compete with others for the audience.
So, what shall I do – you may ask me.
You should arouse interest in your readers!
Each blogger must decide, how he or she wants to charm their visitors. If you don’t have any idea – below you can find 20 tips, how you can attract your posts. Of course you can choose only one or few of them.
But remember – your readers don’t like boredom.
How to Attract Your Blog Posts – 20 Tips For Normal People
1. Use Pictures or Photos
A lot of people say, that one picture is worth more than thousand words. I agree with them – and you?
2. Use Graphs and Tables
Some type of your readers like numbers. You can help them in reading post on your blog by placing graphs or tables inside.
3. Prepare Rankings
Rankings are great both in getting more readers and in selling your own or affiliate products. You can make your rankings for almost everything – products, websites, tools
5 Most Powerful Blogs About Blogging And Making Money Online
4. Use Videos
Videos are great both for people and for SEO. You can find a lot of videos on YouTube. Placing them in your blog post is very easy.
5. Use Infographics
Infographics are relatively new way of showing information or knowledge. But are very informative and easy to absorb
6. Make Interviews with Others in Your Niche
A lot of people like interviews – and it concern not only reading interviews, but also be interviewed.
7. Prepare list(s)
People are lazy (I’m lazy too). They like lists, because lists save their time.
If your list is great, it may be even linked by others 🙂
Below you can find some examples of lists:
The Entrepreneur’s Handbook: 101 Resources for First Time Entrepreneurs
Women in Blogging: 125 Fearless Female Bloggers
37 Ways a Virtual Assistant can Grow your Internet Business
8. Tell Your Own Stories
Nothing is better for your readers than telling a great story. It may be an example of how you made something or even lessons learned from the past. But there is one, very important thing in telling stories – you are not allowed to lie!
9. Give Examples
Showing examples is very similar to the previous point. But here you can describe not only your experience, but also experiences of somebody else. What’s more – in that case you can link to his/her story. It will be appreciated…
10. Use Slideshows
Power Point slideshow is great not only for executing presentation, but also for showing your readers something important. You can upload and share your presentation for example on Slideshare
Social media means business presentation
11. Be Controversial
This point may be very dangerous, if you aren’t familiar with discussed topic or made something stupid. But in most cases, you will only trigger discussion below your post or on other blogs. Great!
12. Make Reviews
People like reviews. If review is made by trusted person or company and in professional way, we will believe in it.
13. Link to Others in Your Niche
Sometimes you want mention about someone’s great post or article in your niche. Just because. After it you can contact with him or her to let them know about it. Maybe they will link back to you? If you want to mention one or more of my posts – don’t hesitate and do it now! But remember about contacting me after it 🙂
14. Use Mind Maps
Mind maps are great for sharing your ideas in graphical way. They are simple to create, and easy to understand
15. Answer on Questions or Resolve Someone’s Problem
Answering on questions or resolving problems is one of the greatest way for making relationships with your guests. With good reason there is a lot of services like How to or Yahoo answers
16. Ask Your Readers About Something
In contrast to answering on questions is asking them 🙂 It’s also good strategy, but firstly you must be recognized as a blogger to use this tip
17. Be “Google friendly”
This post isn’t Google friendly. First of all – title isn’t searched a lot of times. I can call this article more attractive for this search engine, but I didn’t. Why? I make some tests…
If you want to get example of competitive keyword – no problem. For example How to use Twitter… (monthly there is about 90.500 exact searches of this phrase) is very competitive keyword. Great tool for such keyword research is Market Samurai (be careful – affiliate link inside!)
18. Be Funny with Your Content
Sometimes you must make your readers laugh. If you are making SEO – you should like this video
19. Make Your Posts Easy to Share with Others
Sometimes you can find great articles about something, and you want to share it with your friends or others (for example on Twitter, Facebook, etc.) But you couldn’t find buttons or even links for sharing. Give your readers possibility for sharing interesting articles!
20. End with Call to Action
If you want to engage your readers – just ask them to make something on your blog. You may ask the question, ask them to comment on your blog, or request about following you on Twitter.
And how about you? Do you like this post? – please tweet it! You don’t like it – please tell us about it! Or maybe you want to share with us your tips, how to attract your article? Feel free and comment it.
All of them are great tips to get organic readers. These days only organic traffic is important for every website.
Thanks for the article Chris.
Hi Ehsan,
of course organic traffic is very important. It’s also important to get returning visitors 😉
Thanks for the comment!
Great list Chris!
I’d say the key is to use a mixture of everything that you have listed. People like variety, so say you publish a post three times a week, do an interview, publish a top list and write a tutorial with videos and pictures, etc. If you mix things up, people are more likely to keep coming back to a site to find out what the latest post is all about.
You could also do a variety of posts on different subjects within a niche. So using the blogging niche as an example, you could write about; blogging, SEO, making money online, driving traffic, writing tips, web design, etc. Whatever niche a site is focused on, there are subjects within it that you can switch between. “Variety is the spice of life” after all!
Great post Chris!
Hi Matt – you are right – different subjects within a niche is also very good solution!
Thanks for the comment.
Great, detailed advice. Thanks so much. I write a lot about creating content and snagging readers’ attention as well. Check it out!
Hi Cherry, thanks for commening,
BR, Chris
Hi Chris,
I love infographics! Some designers are really creative with them. Videos are also a great way to attract readers ( had quite a good laugh at the video, by the way ). I also like to see images of cute cats and dogs on a blog and pictures of wonderful places to visit.
But the content is still #1 for me. The headline is what will interest me first and if the content delivers, I’ll stay and browse other posts.
You’re right about lists saving time. Kristi at Kikolani has a weekly resources that I like. Every Friday she features the best post of the week on blogging, business, freelancing, SEO, and social media.
Hi, thanks for the comment. Of course content is a king and linking is a queen 🙂 But content isn’t only in words 😉
And yes, Kristi is making a very good job on Kikolani, not only with those lists.
Theresa, welcome to my blog,
BR, Chris
Hi Chris,
great post, thanks for sharing.
All the points you mentioned are really useful to attract readers and keep visitors coming back.
I think that most of all the personal point of view is important, as blogging is a topic that was discussed about many many times already.
Thinking out of the box is also important.
Btw, I laugh so hard watching the video.
“They want us to just create the site and keep adding more and more content and wait 6 years before it generates some f…ing money”. 😀
Hi Erik,
thanks for the comment. I agree with you, that almost everything about blogging was discussed. But it’s similar to watching footbal (soccer) – we can watch it and watch it…
And yes – this video rulez!
BR, Chris
Hi Chris, You have mentioned on your post that we must use a picture to every blog post. I just want to ask from you that where do you get free images for your blog?
Hi Ehsan,
I didn’t mention, that every blog post must have a picture, but they should 😉 These photos aren’t free – I bought them on Fotolia.com. There are a lot of services with free photos, but I don’t use them. Even on Flickr.com you can find some photos without copyrights (but you must read lincense of each photo very carefully). BR, Chris
You buy photos?:O Shocked! You can get free photos from many websites. Best example is freedigitalphotos.net
Hi Ehsan, of ocourse there is a lot of srevices, where you can get photos for free. But sometimes paid are betters 😉
I love infographic most. The beauty, the power, and how these “graphics” go viral. But it takes lots of time to make a good infographic 🙁
Hi Tho, yes – infographics are great. But you can order them or use one of existing (with link to the source). Thanks fo the comment.
BR, Chris
Great article – I see you used a mix of everything you talked about which is great! I try and mix it up (no infographics though) on my own site. It is important to not overuse one type of content – all YouTube vids, infographics, list articles etc… People want variety!
Hi Jason,
I don’t remember where (probably on SEOmoz), I read an article, in which author prepare statistics, which articles are “viral”. And the winner are articles with 3 or more different types of content. So…
Thanks for commenting,
BR, Chris
Awesome tips, I really love the subtitle of the video 🙂 thanks for share
Hi Trung,
penguin rulez 😉
BR, Chris
Hi Chris!
This is such a great help for a newbie like me. Thanks a lot.
Claire
Hi Claire,
you are welcome!
BR, Chris
Chris,
One question I have is do you recommend a quality tool for making info graphics? or do you do them by hand with photoshop?
Hi David, unfortunatelly I’m not graphic atrist – so I don’t know, if there is dedicated tool for info graphics. For some basic graphic work I use Gimp – it’s free tool, with a lot of features.
Thanks for commenting and welcome to my blog 🙂
BR, Chris
Hey Chris,
This is a great post. If beginner bloggers were to put half of these tips to use, in a matter of a couple of months they would have found their voice.
Good job!
Hi Yeremi, some of these tips are useful even for problogger 😉
Thanks for the comment, Chris
I think the greatest way to get noticed with your blog posts is simple – be creative. Each niche has hundreds if not thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of websites writing content, already. If you don’t give readers a reason to read you content over the A-list blog that’s already established, they won’t. You can, luckily, be creative in so many different aspects – the ideas you generate, the style in which you write, or even the way you design your website. Society will show you that eye-candy goes a long way.
If you aren’t able to be creative with your content, then you probably aren’t passionate about your niche, so it’s probably best that you just leave anyway. Great post.
Hi Joe, thanks for stopping here. I agree with you – you must be original and creative with your content to be competitive.
BR. Chris
Oh man that video is funny…… Ha Ha Ha Ha.
Great you are like it 😉
Great Post Chris. Specailly Power Point Presentation option. Soon i will use that on my Blog.
Thanks.
Thanks for the comment, Amit. Yes, presentation is also great, but video is my #1. Unfortunatelly I don’t have self made videos on my blog – I have to change it…
Chris,
Awesome article. Definitely a keeper. I’m putting it into my “just awesome blog posts” board on Pinterest. Yes, I use it. It’s where I curate (publicly) posts I want to go back to.. Thanks for pulling this great post together!
Hi Tom – thanks for your comment and once more thanks for your tip about FB notes 😉
BR, Chris
Nice group of options there cheers.. I found your blog though Pinterest 🙂
Thanks for your support 😉
BTW – nice article about Squido, I like it.
Blogs are the excellent means of communicating with your visitors. So knowing these tips would definitely be a great help for all the bloggers. Thanks for providing.
Hey chris, It seems you have covered almost all the points which can be implemented to make a post viral.
not surpised to see “images” on No1, i have done a research about this too and most of the people say images really grab their attention.
Props to you buddy for writing this awesome post.
Hi SahL, thanks for your comment. It’s very simple – images are working for me. That’s why pictures are on the 1st place 🙂
Sweet info Chris!
Thanks Costas!
Thank You, I really want some very useful tips on writing an original article. I like your tips and techniques. very well. keep in touch. Regards, Umar
Well, That’s a great list Chris.
Well written. Congrats and keep it up 🙂
useful info thanks
Hope these are some genuine ways to make attractive blog posts.
Am following some ways, but will try to add inforgraphs, videos, mind maps and slideshows to my posts.
Thanks for sharing this nice ways, keep writing 🙂
I use a mix of the above in the article, I find infographics are great for bringing in the readers,special if it’s a topic that is either trending our is something to do with the news etc.
Lists are another great one and when I had the time I used to do these weekly, but haven’t done any for a while, maybe I should bring them back, like I have done with the blogger interviews.
Thanks for the post! That video is indeed hilarious hahaha
Mind Maps… something I haven’t heart of for a while but I’ll definitely be revisiting after reading this blog post.
Hi Chris,
Image is really a great source of traffic. It is necessary to put relevant image into your blog post to grasp the attention of the viewers.
I love the whole “be yourself” concept. Blogging was so much easier for me when I learned how to just be authentic and share my passion with storytelling. People can relate to that so much more than anything else. Thanks for sharing these tips!
thanks for the creative article.
Good list 🙂 I certainly agree with what you’ve written. However, I’ve been put off using pictures because Google wouldn’t allow me to have ads on my blog – it said that I use too many pictures. Have a look at my blog and see if you agree with Google. I hardly ever use pictures! As such, I’ve been left very confused.
Hi Chris,
What a great list, you have mentioned some new ways that I have never thought of like Answering questions that have been mentioned on Yahoo answers and using mind maps. Really thanks for sharing this list.
Hello chris..
Thanks for sharing these tips for making attractive blog. As you know , organic traffics are more important for any blogger.These are thebest tips for increase organic traffic.
Thanks 🙂
Hy Chris, till now i was using almost all the above discussed techniques mentioned by you for attracting readers except than the Slideshare one. And now i am going to make my first Slideshare for Dreamtechie.com
This one help me lot to attract the people through the impressive posts.
These are great tips especially for maintaining Google traffic.