Like many other subjects that I have approached on this blog, the issue of “new visitors vs returning visitors” has been highly debated. I see people asking about this on forums quite often, so I thought it was time to share my opinion about it.
Don’t bark at the moon!
When you first decide to start blogging you must struggle to find ways to attract visitors and at the same time provide quality content to make them come back. The best idea would be to have a bunch of posts saved and publish one each day, while you concentrate only on promotion.
Every blog owner knows how difficult it is to make his presence noticed on the blogosphere. But what happens when you run out of pre-made posts?
When is it enough?
If you keep allocating too much time for promotion you will find yourself in a position where either you are not updating often or not producing quality content. If this happens, there is a high chance that you will lose your small group of loyal visitors that you have worked so hard to get. I am NOT saying that you should stop promoting your blog, but you must chose your promotion methods carefully, so they don’t take up too much of your time. I know people that spend around 4 hours a day, only to submit their blog to directories. This particular method may be a little useful at the beginning but you won’t get very far with it. Directories drive an insignificantly amount of traffic, and the link popularity that you gain from it may be useless if you are in a slightly competitive niche.
Your first priority must be to keep your returning visitors happy by providing them with the same quality content that made them return in the first place.
They can increase your popularity in various and natural ways (linking, submitting your articles to social media sites, word of mouth, pigeons, paper planes, etc) a lot more than you alone could. Even if they will not link to you after 2-3 visits, keep doing what you are doing and it will be impossible not hit the jackpot from time to time. Eventually people will not only post comments on your blog but also they will start to spread the word around.
Good things come to those who wait
“Loyal visitors don’t click on my ads!” - Yes, this is true. They are familiar with ad placement and within a period of time they develop a “syndrom” that many people like to call “ad blindness”. The best traffic for this purpose is coming from search engines, but since ranking in SEs is directly related to the number of anchored links, how will you be able to get it? This is why blogging is not for people that want to make money quickly…
It is almost like in the restaurant business: Build the restaurant, advertise a lot to get you started, but always try to improve your quality standards, don’t disappoint your clients, and the word will spread around.
Good tips. You need to keep a spell checker handy “loose/lose”…
I still get 75% of my traffic from search engines which means only 25% of my traffic is returning readers!
Hi Steve,
Thanks for the comment and for pointing that out. I always do little mistakes like this, especially because English is not my first language.