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?

Why You Should Be Guest Posting

Guest Posting Will Earn You New Traffic

Guest posting is one of the best ways to get exposure to someone else's established reader base.  If you can get your post hosted on a much bigger site, then your post will be seen by many readers.  Many of these new readers will never have been to your site.  If you are supplying excellent content to your hosting site, readers will follow links within your guest post back to your site to see what else you have to say. 

These guest posts can result in a major spike in traffic, especially if you are guest posting on a very influential or well known blog or site.  Along with this spike in traffic, readers that link your site's content will add you to their daily feed reader, sign up for your update or newsletters, or click on ads or products on your site.  All of these are excellent rewards for your exposure into a new reader base.

When contacting another blogger about a possible guest post on their site always be professional and courteous.  If you are declined, don't harass the site owner with constant inquiries.  Only ask once and listen closely to any denial reason they give you.  That reason could be very helpful for you in fixing your content or your site.  Remember that even though the host may receive some benefit from hosting your content, you are the one getting the bigger favor here.  Always submit great content for any guest post as this will greatly benefit both you and the host and could turn into guest post offers from other readers as well.  Always be on the lookout for guest post oppurtunities while you are building your relationship with other bloggers.

Hosting Guest Posts

Guest Posting is also a great tool for your own blog as well.  You will receive readers from the contributors audience just as they will receive visitors from yours.  Keep a list of bloggers that are interested in doing a guest post for your site so that you can use their posts when you are short on ideas or you are going on vacation.  If they are submitting their great content for you to host, you will benefit from keyword rich content and relevancy to your site's niche.