Keeping Your Special Visitors

Special Visitors

Two of the best ways to get new visitors to your site are from guest posting and participating in blogging carnivals.  Guest posting allows you to get new visitors from an already establish site.  The trust they lend when hosting your post helps to send readers to your site as a vote of approval for you.  After all, they are hosting your post which is a form of promotion.

Blogging carnivals tend to be very popular sources of many viewpoints on a shared topic.  Many times these readers will visit your site and view your carnival submitted post.  If they enjoyed your content for the blogging carnival, there next step may be to review your current post or look at interesting topics in your archives.  Either way you want to keep those special visitors coming back.  You want to convert them into new regular readers and not just a one time visitor that bounces right out of your site after reading your original entry.

How To Keep Them

There are a few things that you can do to help your rate of converting those new special visitors into regular readers or subscribers.  After they become subscribers or regular readers, there are much better chances that you can convert them to customers, if your goal is to market a product of your own or to promote affiliate products.

Here are a few strategies to help convert special visitors into subscribers or regular readers.

1. Make sure you have a top quality post on days that blogging carnivals are released.
2. Have a high quality post on the day your guest post airs on another site.
3. Have an area that showcases your most popular posts so favorite posts can be easily found.
4. Have your newsletter or subscribing option listed above the fold so it is easily seen.
5. Use deep internal links within your submitted carnival and guest post entries.

Anyone have any other strategies for converting your special guests to regular readers?

7 Reasons To Showcase Popular Posts

Showcase Your Popular Posts

You can showcase your most popular posts with a widget.  There are many reasons why you should use this option on your blog.  The widget ranks your posts based on page views, so your content that is the most read is easily available for others to read.  You can set up to show up to 10 posts as the most popular.  Your most viewed pages are probably your best posts and should be easily available for new visitors.  Be sure to place this showcase of your content above the fold on your landing page.

Reasons To Show Your Top Posts

1. Your most popular posts are usually your best content.  You should show it off.
2. New readers will appreciate the consolidation of posts and it gives those new readers a great list of articles to read to get the feel of your site and your writing style.
3. Showcasing your top content can lead to more subscriptions to your feed reader or newsletter.
4. Once you have identified your most read posts, you know what kind of posts your readers are looking for.  You can better target posts for your audience.
5. Your page views and time on site will increase, while your bounce rate also decreases.
6. You are providing a list of content that has a better chance to be linked from others sites.
7. Having identified some of your most commonly viewed posts, you can go back and add affiliate advertising links or purchase options on those high traffic pages.

I use a popular posts list on all my sites.  Do you?  Can you think of any other benefits from showcasing your popular content?