HowTo : Helping New Visitors Turn Themselves Into Loyal Readers

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You, as a blogger, surely want to expand your reader base, don’t you? You might receive several thousand visits a day to your blog. Probably, over 75% of them are new to your blog. What’s important for you is to somehow convert those new visits into loyal readers. You’ve got to make them feel comfortable with your blog and make them feel at home with your blog.

So, to help you do this, I am writing about several WordPress plugins you can use to do the job. Believe me, this works.

What Would Seth Godin Do

You might have this plugin in action(though you probably didn’t know it was there) on some sites you visited for the first time. You might have even seen it action here(at the top of this post, in fact ), if you’re a new visitor. What this plugin basically does is that it displays a set-by-you message at the top or at the bottom of each post, welcoming new visitors to your blog and encouraging them to subscribe to your RSS feed. Here’s a screen shot:

The above is the message displayed(in all post pages) to all new visitors on my blog. After 3 visits of that visitor to my blog, this message is no longer displayed to that particular visitor. You can set the number of visits manually too.

Download the WWSGD WordPress plugin

Note: Since the welcome message shown to new visitors, this would be a great place to include some information about your blog and links to your blog’s feed, to help the visitor.

Thank those who comment

Thanking people for visiting your blog, commenting, etc is a great way to show visitor appreciation and support. Readers begin to trust you and your credibility more. Why shouldn’t they? After all, you appreciate them for everything they do on your blog!

Sending commentators a thank-you email is also good. But if you have many comments, this can become a head ache. This is where the Comment Relish plugin comes in. According to the author,

Comment relish is a Wordpress plugin developed to send an e-mail message to users who comment on your website who have never commented before. The message dispatched to the user is defined within the plugin’s preferences.

Isn’t that great? Sending customized emails automatically to every one who comments? It’s easy and simple. Just download the plugin and then set up the email template. For example, here’s what I send:

The stuff between the %s are placeholders for things like the name of the commentator.

More about it on the plugin page

The Welcome Plugin

The Welcome Plugin is one of my favourites. You can see it in action here on this blog(below the feed buttons in the sidebar) It’s an amazing plugin that displays a piece of text some where on your blog, welcoming returning visitors, addressing with their name. Where does it get the name? There are several different methods. You can get more info on the plugin page.

Those three plugins are sure-fire ways to get you more readers and to convert new visitors into loyal readers.