How to Turn Your Casual Readers into Your Biggest Fans

This is a guest post by Ginny Soskey, a marketing manager at Shareaholic. Shareaholic provides social sharing, related content and content analytics tools for more than 200,000 websites, reaching 300 million people each month. You can follow Ginny on Twitter at @gsosk.

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You’ve probably read a billion posts on how to increase overall traffic on your blog through social media. The numbers don’t lie—from Shareaholic’s publisher network of 200,000 blogs and websites reaching 300 million people each month, we’ve found that 34% of the traffic sent to our publisher websites was through referral traffic. This referral traffic is highly influenced by how many times your content gets shared on social media because the more shares you have, the more likely people are to come to your site via social media.

But your real problem isn’t getting more visitors to your site — it’s getting them to stay on your site once they’re there. Maybe you rely primarily on social media to promote your content or use contests to drive new visitors to your site. Though contests and social media promotion are great ways to amp up your pageviews, you’ll often see your bounce rate go up with them.

Ultimately, your goal should be to increase your dedicated reader base. These readers are most likely to share your content in the future, comment on your posts with feedback and maybe even form a community around your content—all of which is essential to eventually monetizing your blog. Lucky for you, there are some simple ways you can start engaging new visitors on your blog to turn them into your biggest fans.

Capturing The Interest Of A New Visitor

It may not always be love at first sight with your readers, so you might need to offer multiple blog posts to visitors before they finally hit that subscribe button. One of the best ways to get new visitors to stay longer on your blog is with a related content tool. A related content tool will recommend your own posts at the bottom of each blog post you publish to help your readers discover more of your content.

Right off the bat, related content tools help increase your overall traffic without you having to lift a finger. You’re already working your tail off pulling late nights, early mornings and/or weekends to put out quality content, so you should be using a tool that helps you do your job better without you having to put much effort in. Once the related content tool is enabled, you can increase your pageviews by simply doing = more of what you do best—creating quality content.

More Interested Readers Spend More Time On Your Blog

With these increased pageviews come an increased time your visitors spend on your site. Because they are spending more of their time reading, watching or listening to your content, visitors will be more likely to enter a giveaway or subscribe to your blog. Like I said before—the longer you keep a visitor on your page, the more likely they will become a dedicated reader and eventually one of your biggest fans.

You also can benefit your search engine rankings by using the right related content tool. If you use an all-in-one tool like Shareaholic, you’ll reduce your page load time because your browser won’t have to handle several blog tools at once. People get antsy when websites don’t load quickly and then might exit your blog—which can ultimately affect your SEO. Google punishes websites with poor page load time because it notices when people leave after just a few seconds. You want to use products with technology that “speak” to each other, like a multi-feature tool such as Shareaholic, which offers social sharing, related content and analytics to offer the best — and fastest — results to boost your SEO efforts.

Helping You Do What You Do Better

Your blog already rocks. A related content tool just makes it better, because it makes sure that your readers see all of that awesome content – which is why they started coming to your blog in the first place. You’re already on your way to building the audience you need—a related content widget just helps you get there faster.