Why Regular Readers Are More Important Than Casual Visitors

When starting a blog, most people measure its success based on the number of visitors that visit on a daily basis. Certainly if the goalis to make money by selling advertising on the blog then visitors are important, but is a high number of visitors an indicator of the blog’s success?
Let’s say that you look at the stats for your page and see that you had 100 visitors in the course of a day. That may seem like a nice number, but if you dig a little deeper, you may also notice that about 10 of those people are returning visitors, and only half of that number stayed on the page for more than 30 seconds. All of a sudden 100 visitors is not as good as it first appeared, because it means you are not building up a strong readership base.
The goal for a blog is usually to get a message across, and to do this the blog needs people who are reading the message, rather than people who are just visiting briefly without really reading anything. If you really want your blog to be successful, then you should really start to focus on readership rather than just visitors. It’s important to understand that a large number of people who visit your blog may have stumbled on it by accident, or followed a link because they thought it seemed interesting. If those people are not returning, then they hold no real value for your blog. Building up a readership means creating a group of people who find your content interesting, and thus will be more likely to comment, click ads on your site, and even spread the word to other like-minded folks.
Having those types of people visit your site on a regular basis will take a lot of the hard work of marketing out of your hands. A strong readership base will help build the popularity of your site by driving visitors to your blog through shares on social networking sites, recommendations to friends, as well as other means. That helps to build an air of confidence and trust in your blog which cannot be gained by passive visitors alone.
To entice one time visitors to become regular readers is not easy, however by updating your blog regularly with content that is both interesting and engaging this can be achieved. Don’t simply rewrite an article that has already been published a thousand times before, and instead try to be original in a way that will encourage people to share what you write.
One way to entice visitors back is to give visitors a reason to want to interact with you, and then try to keep the conversation going, whether that is in the comments section of your blog, or on a social networking outlets. Making your visitors feel as though they are a large part of the growth of your site will encourage them to come back
again and again. If you can do that, then those visitors will stay, and pretty soon those 100 visitors per day will all be regular readers.