Even as you have been a successful blogger with your SEO strategy and social networking skills, it is important to keep your existing readers. Your readers are your consumers, those who make you write in the first place – if you came to know that no one reads your blogs, why would you take the effort to post contents on your blog and publish them? Now that you have your readers, you should know how to retain them for the long run. To get a few readers once in a while and to keep losing them at the end of the day is not going to serve your purpose, if you are a serious blogger.

How do you keep your readers? How do you satisfy your existing readers? How do you give them what they want so that they keep coming to you for what they are searching for?

If you have been lucky enough or if you have worked hard enough to get for yourself a reasonable set of readers, make sure you have them intact, with a few blogging tips that you should follow:

1.       Know your Readers: It is not easy to know who your readers are in the blogging world. They could be anyone from any part of the world. You could perhaps use statistical tools such as Google Analytics to have an idea of the relative mix of readers that you receive from the different parts of the world; yet, you still do not exactly know what they are, why they are here and what they expect out of you. It is important to have as much information as possible about your readers. It is like a business catering to the needs of a customer – if an organisation does not know who its customer is, it could possibly not cater to the needs of the customer at all. The basic aspect about retaining your reader is to know your reader.

2.       Be interactive: One way you can know your readers is to encourage dialogue. Your readers would keep mum if you do not ask them to talk out. Or, even if you do not ask them to speak out, you could perhaps introduce some probing questions in your posts. You could end your post with a question about the content in the post, leading your readers to think. If you spoon-feed them with all you can, they would eat what you give and keep moving. Questions about issues, like “What do you think about this solution?” or, “do you think this is the best way to do it?”, or, “if you were in this position, would you have opted for a different option?” would do a lot of good in eliciting reader involvement and in making them think, rather than just read. Leaving posts open-ended would also encourage them to come up with answers to what you have asked.

3.       Encourage Comments: There is nothing wrong with asking for comments. If you haven’t had many frequent comments in your blog, asking for comments would help. When you ask or leave the option to comment open explicitly, people may think about what they have to say about the post that they have just read, which, they may perhaps not do otherwise.

4.       Try to be controversial: Now, that in itself is a controversial blogging tip. Perhaps, I should give you that tip with a caution and a disclaimer attached to it! This tip is for advanced blogging, for bloggers who are extremely confident of themselves in dealing with their readers and in their ability to handle the topic. Once in a while, you can afford to be controversial. By that, I do not suggest you make a mess of things that you have taken so long to build, but you could broach on a topic with your views not being just the straight forward plain vanilla type alone. While this is not to be tried too often (else, you may be labelled a controversial person – and you wouldn’t be able to come out of your controversies even if you wanted to!), being off-track once in a while wakes your reader up with a little jerk and again, makes him think – a good ploy to break the monotony of the same topics getting repeated in the same styles.

5.       Get them to Twitter: Twitter is definitely interactive. This is where you get to hear your readers and you interact with them at a personal level. Having a blog with regular readers gives you the licence to get them on to your Twitter account. Your Twitter account is a lot more liberal than your blog in that it gives you the liberty to talk on different topics, albeit shortly. This is a refreshing way to be in touch with your readers and also to hear to what they have to say. You would know what their personalities are and more importantly, you get to know the actual person who reads you!

It takes more than just blogging to be a successful blogger. If you can take these additional steps and get closer to your reader, you would have almost guaranteed your success with blogs.