Most people blog because they want to share something–their opinion, their knowledge, or a bit about their daily life.  Others do it for more cathartic reasons; after all I have found writing to be very therapeutic and it often helps relieve stress to “get stuff of my chest” through the keyboard.  Regardless of your motivation, it is flattering when others read what you write and find inspiration in your words.  I recently shared a few ways to attract an audience, so now I’ll share ways to lose one.

Five Ways to Lose Readers

1.  Be a know-it-all.  Nobody likes to listen to a know-it-all, and they don’t like to read stuff from one, either.  If you want to really connect with people then you have to share both your successes and your failures.  I readily admit to my screw-ups when blogging, and then share the lessons learned from that experience in the hopes that it will help someone else.

2.  Don’t write anything for weeks.  There will be times when you simply cannot meet your traditional blog schedule.  That’s fine; most readers recognize that you have a life and will forgive a short vacation from posting.  However, when a few days turns into a few weeks, or even months, your site goes stale.  Readers have a lot of options these days, and if you fail to put out any new material for a long time you might just become dead weight on their feed reader.

3.  Be insulting.  What’s that old saying, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all?”  Yeah, I heard that a lot growing up because I was rather opinionated (still am).  But this is a case where you want to take the moral high-road.  It’s fine to disagree with other bloggers, or readers who leave comments, but do so respectfully and then thank them for sharing their opinion.  I love a good argument, and oddly enough am closest to those I typically disagree with, but only because they are as respectful of my opinion as they are of mine.

4.  Do not engage readers. Most bloggers will admit that they could do a better job of interacting with readers–via email or comments.  So could I.  But I do try to make an effort to respond to those who take the time to email me with questions or comments, and I try to respond to comments on individual articles.  One note about this, blog authors can sometimes be “thread-killers” in that they’ll jump in the middle of a particular volley of comments and squash the whole discussion.  It isn’t necessary to ALWAYS repond to every single comment, or interject your own opinion in a heated debate.  Let your readers battle it out; that’s what builds a sense of community at your blog.

5.  Allow ads to dominate your theme.  A few blog advertisements are acceptable.  In fact, I take them as a sign of a healthy blog, and I personally have no problems with bloggers earning a part-time (or full-time) living from their work.  After all, they are providing content to me for free, usually at their own expense.  But you can take monetizing too far and allow ads to dominate your blog’s theme.  While sneaking in the occasional affiliate link is fine, you wouldn’t want every single sentence to include an ad.  And you wouldn’t want 3/4 of your page to be taken up by banner advertisements, leaving only a small fraction of space for your content.  After all, it is your content that readers return to see, not the latest deals from eBay.

Photo courtesy of lepiaf.geo

• Learn French In France
• How do you read a book?
• Town In Tennessee Survives On Three Hours Of Water A Day.

Ever visited a blog and noticed the author never responds to comments? Ever emailed a blogger and never received a reply?  It’s frustrating, isn’t it?  Well, in the defense of non-communicating bloggers everywhere I will tell you that blogging is a lot of work, particularly if you are doing it as a side hustle.  But as a reader of several dozen other blogs, I am sensitive to how important it is to interact with readers.

There are a variety of ways to interact with readers, but here are three that I try to use with some consistency.  I admit up front to not always taking my own advice and have on occasion failed to respond to comments in an article, let an email go by, or spent a couple days away from Twitter. Still, I think these three tools are critical in developing a relationship between bloggers and their readers.

Three Strategies To Improve Reader Interaction

Respond to comments.  The easiest way to respond to readers is to simply leave a comment in response to something they said in response to one of your posts.  I like to start out the comment with something like “@Frugal Dad:” so readers will know to whom my response is directed.  It isn’t necessary to respond to every single comment, but try to respond to those who make the best point, or disagree with you, etc.  Don’t be overly defensive in your response, and even if you disagree in principle thank the reader for taking the time to leave a comment.

If you are a WordPress user, you may want to consider installing the “Highlight Author Comments” plug-in.  With a simple CSS line you can make your comments standout by modifying the background color, and/or surrounding your comments with a border.

Answer email messages promptly. over time, this gets harder and harder to do as your readership grows and so does the number of messages you receive.  I try to respond to all emails in time, but based on my workload and the number in my inbox it might take a while.  Still, answering emails with a personal message to readers is a great way to build reader loyalty.  And I’ve discovered that most of my readers are much smarter than I am and quite often I learn something from them!

Invite readers to follow you on Twitter.  I love Twitter because it does two things well.  It allows you to easily respond to others who have directed a comment or question your way, and it forces you to keep the message short (140 characters or less).  This helps both bloggers and readers stay on point with messages.  I use Twitter for sharing things of more of a personal nature–sort of a behind the scenes look at what’s going on in the Frugal Dad household.  I also seed blog post ideas in Twitter by asking questions of followers for informal survey results, or to gauge interest in a particular topic.

Again, there is more to blogging than simply writing great content. If you want to be successful at blogging you have to go beyond that, and work to build your personal brand. Responding to readers with a willingness to help them with a problem, or thank them for an encouraging message, will go a long way towards building your online reputation in a positive way.

Photo by edans

• Secrets Of A Stingy Scoundrel Giveaway!!!
• Easy Ways to Increase Organic Visitors to Your Corporate Blog
• How to Avoid Conflict in Relationships

Seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it?  How do you get subscribers without asking for them?  Well, that’s not exactly what I mean–I was just using an example of a catchy title (more on that later).  What I was really referring to is the idea of avoiding use of the word “subscribe.”

Most blogs today have some sort of feed icon (like the one in this post) with the word “subscribe” indicating a place where visitors can sign up to receive their content.  Subscribers can typically subscribe via RSS feed or email delivery.  Best of all, the service is typically provided for free by providers like FeedBurner.  The problem is that most web visitors still think of the word “subscribe” as an action that requires money.  After all, very few subscriptions in the off-line world are really free.

Free Daily Updates

So instead of using verbiage around the word “Subscribe,” I recommend using another method to entice readers to sign up for your automated content delivery.  “Free Daily Updates” works well, as does “Receive Via Email.”  Neither option sound like they cost money, and that is what you want to sell to potential subscribers.

One way to test this service is to create a dedicated subscription page and name it “Subscribe” in your menu bar.  After a month or so swtich the text to “Free Daily Updates” and see if you have more subscribers (as a percentage of traffic) at the end of the second month. If not, experiment with other terms like “Get By Email.”

When you find something that seems to work well for your readers, be sure to update any subscription buttons or links with the same text.  Also include a similar tag in your email signature and any off-line marketing materials you might distribute promoting your blog.

Photo courtesy of St A Sh

• Smart Money Is On Web Site Traffic
• Easy Ways to Increase Organic Visitors to Your Corporate Blog
• New Design Of The Free Magazine Subscriptions Page.