How to get readers come back to your blog

Blogging has its own challenges and successful bloggers rarely talk about them.Maybe you saw those tempting, blogging income reports that were being posted around the web.

For example, Lindsay Ostrom made $29,053.44 in the month of August 2015. Matthew Woodward made $23,470.13 in the same month.

Read: Top 10 money making bloggers and their income reports.

You might be tempted to start your own blog and believe you can make $20,000. Yes, of course, you can even make more than that. But it will never be possible if you don’t have some repeat visitors.

Lindsay Ostrom may have earned $29,053.44 from her blog. What you may not know is that 40% of those visits were from people who are not first-time readers.

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Matthew Woodward may have earned $23,470.13 from his blog, but a whopping 45% were repeat visitors.
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So you need lots of repeat visitors. You have a business if your blog receives 30,000 visits a month and at least 30% of that comes from repeat visitors.

Repeat visit is an important metric every blogger should watch.

How can you get readers to keep coming back to your blog? How can you make people stick with your blog and forget your competitors?

These are interesting questions. This article provides you with everything you need to know to get loads of repeat visits on your blog.

Let me introduce the CODA formula to you. It’s a powerful formula that can help you get lots of repeat visitors.

CODA means Content, Outreach, Design and Action.

Are you ready to learn the CODA formula?

Then, let’s get started.

1. Content: How to Create Contents That Spread Like Wildfire

You may have heard it many times: They say content is king. Is that true? No!

Content isn’t king anymore. Great content is the new king.

Don’t publish a 500-word blog post you quickly typed in Microsoft Word and expect social shares, page views, comments and links to start rolling in. Your fluffy 1000-word article won’t bring any worthwhile page views even if you ask all your friends to share it on Twitter.

You need great contents that can spread around the web without you promoting the hell out of it.

How can you create such contents?

There are 3 things I do:

Don’t Re-Invent The Wheel

Don’t ever try to do any new thing. You’ll waste a lot of time trying to find a new thing that will stick on the wall. Instead of doing that, find something that stuck on the wall, and make it 10x better. Rand Fishkin calls this the 10x content. I like that name.

Your competitors have written a lot of blog posts, isn’t it? Some of their blog posts were popular while many of their blog posts weren’t popular. Your job is to find those competitors’ contents that were popular. Then make them 10x better. Wow, you’ll have lots of great contents that people will start talking about you.

Here are my 3 top favorite tools for finding competitors’ contents that were popular:

  1. BuzzSumo
  2. Open Site Explorer
  3. Ahrefs

After you’ve found your competitors’ popular contents using any of the above tools,make the contents 10x better by going in-depth, adding more images, more videos – it’s all about improving the quality.

For example, let’s say your competitor published a blog post titled “10 Ways to Surprise Your Girlfriend”, you should make it 10x better by writing “20 Ways to Surprise Your Girlfriend”. Then you should add more pictures, videos and graphics. If you can write “40 Ways to Surprise Your Girlfriend” do it. Your goal is to knock out your competitor’s content.

Surprise People

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months.

They studied over 7,500 popular articles during those six months.

The study yielded a big discovery.

They found that articles that produce positive emotions are more likely to go viral.

Positive emotion can quickly transmit from one person to another. Contents with positive emotions like joy, surprise, awe, pride, and love are likely to spread because people won’t hesitate to share them with their friends.

So, when next you create content for your blog, think of a positive emotion you can associate with your content. Make your content produce that positive emotion in your readers and watch your content spread.

The further your content spread, the more visitors you have. That gives you more repeat visitors.

People won’t go back to a blog that made them sad, weep and felt disgusted the last time. In fact, they will want to stay away from such blogs.

Write Super-Catchy Headlines

Check your Twitter Timeline and your Facebook Newsfeed, you’ll see lots of contents.

You don’t have time to read all those contents. Your time is limited. You have lots of things to do. Other web users are like that too. So, instead of reading anything that pops up on their Timeline or Newsfeed, what they do is just read the headline. If the headline is interesting enough, they click and read the content. If the headline isn’t interesting, they just move on to the next headline.

You want people to click on your headline when they see it on Twitter, Facebook and Google?

Then you have to start writing super-catchy headlines.

A super-catchy headline is a type of headline the reader can’t wait to read.

What makes a headline catchy?

There are 4 things:

  1. Useful: Why is the blog post valuable?
  2. Ultra-specific: What can I expect to learn from the blog post?
  3. Unique: Why is this blog post compelling and unique?
  4. Urgent: Why should I read this NOW?

2. Outreach: How to Develop Relationship with Influencers

Outreach is the O in the CODA formula. Keep that in mind.

If you want lots of repeat visitors, then you have to do outreach.

Why do you have to do outreach?

There are 11 reasons why I do outreach:

  1. Pitch a guest post
  2. Ask for a quote on a relevant topic
  3. Invite influencers to contribute to your blog
  4. Invite influencers to take part in a one on one interview
  5. Invite influencers to take part in a group interview
  6. Offer up an infographic influencers can publish on their blog
  7. Pitch a giveaway to promote a product
  8. Offer some unique data influencers can use in their blog posts
  9. Ask for a link to one of your blog posts
  10. Offer readers of popular blogs a free copy of your product to try out
  11. Help influencers out and ask for nothing in return (helping is the new currency of the web)

All these 11 reasons can give you repeat visitors. They will help you develop a relationship with influential bloggers who have large readerships.

When people start seeing your name pop-up on every influential blog, they’ll want to visit your blog and see the stuff you have on it.

This is the power of outreach: It helps you develop a relationship with both bloggers and their readers.

So if you are not seeing a lot of repeat visitors, you should ask yourself “are you doing enough outreach?” If not, then it’s time to start.

3. Design: Having An Attractive Blog Design Is The Key


Bloggers are now the third most trustworthy source of information, following only friends and family, according to a U.K. survey.

Bloggers are even more trusted than celebrities, journalists, brands, and politicians. People are in love with blogs. But not ugly blogs. People are in love with blogs that are attractive and make them feel at home while on the web.

Your blog is like your home where people can visit you.

Imagine you have visitors at your home today, and your visitors can see and smell trash everywhere, what would they do?

They will leave fast and may never return.

The same thing applies to blogging. Your blog is like your home. It should be attractive. It should make people feel good.

Beautiful blogs, they are the type of blogs people can trust.

It may cost you thousands of dollars to renovate and beautify your home, but beautifying your blog will only cost you less than $100.

There are good blog designs out there that won’t break the bank. I recommend popular ones from StudioPress, the maker of Genesis Child Themes, and I also recommend Thesis Themes.

If you have less than $50, you may get a modest design at Themeforest.

Just like your home, if your blog is ugly, none of your visitors will bother to come back.

4. Action: How to Write The Best Call-to-Actions

Now, I will like to ask you this simple question “why are you blogging in the first place?”.

Wait. Before you answer that question, I will like to say that you may be blogging for the purpose of quitting your day job and becoming your own boss. I know that. That’s a good reason to blog. But that’s not what I’m asking now.

The reason why you’re blogging should be visible on your blog.

Most bloggers blog for one thing: to collect their readers’ email addresses.

When you have your readers’ email addresses, you can always notify them when next you publish a new content on your blog. And you can always notify them when you have new products you want them to buy.

Readers who visited your blog and dropped their email addresses are more likely to return. But readers who visited your blog and left without dropping their email addresses may never return again. This might be because you didn’t ask those readers to give you their email address.

Matthew Woodward made $23,470.13 in the month of August. Lindsay Ostrom made $29,053.44 from her food blog in the same month. Their blogs both have over 40% of repeat visitors. What I may not tell you above is the fact that both of them are collecting their readers email addresses. That is what give them the opportunity to make that much.

So you should do the same thing on your blog. Make sure you’re collecting the email address of your visitors.

The more email address you have, the higher your repeat visits. And with a high number of repeat visitors, you too can start making $20,000 a month from your blog.

About the author

Jojo Joson

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