This is a guest post by Matt Powers.
A successful blogger not only knows how to draw traffic to their site, they know how to keep their readers coming back time and time again. This requires a deep understanding of your target audience including their day-to-day concerns, their interests, how their problems can be solved, and much more. It sounds like a lot but there are some clear steps to help you achieve this more easily.
In time, by staying consistent, it will become like second nature to you. By keeping these five blogging tips in mind, you’ll increase the likelihood of being a highly successful blogger.
Building Relationships
Building relationships with your readers is a key aspect of successful blogging and in order to do this you not only need to interact with your readers but you need to be genuine and authentic by expressing true emotions while at the same time being informative.
If you aren’t authentic and appear dishonest, your readers will begin to distrust you and will eventually disappear altogether. Be sure your blog includes a personal touch that enables your readers to connect to you and to what you are saying. Be real and the relationships will build naturally with those interested.
Know Your Readers Well
By engaging with your readers, you’ll not only help to build relationships with them, you’ll get to know their needs which will in turn provide you with ideas on what to write about. This is one of the biggest factors in attracting people in your target market. What type of problems do they have that you might assist in solving?
One way to get to know your readers better is to survey them with a poll on your site/blog. You should also encourage interaction and feedback on every blog post with a call to action at the end asking the reader to share their thoughts and opinions. This builds engagement but also tells you more about your readers and what they want.
Meet Their Needs
Now that you know what your readers want, be sure to meet their needs. Use their questions to write posts that will provide the answers they’re looking for. This is a great way to earn trust and once you begin to answer their questions concisely, help with problem solving and provide other useful information, the more likely they are to share your content with others.
While a blog is a space to share your personal feelings and opinions, if you spend too much time focused on yourself, your readers will grow bored. It’s not all about you – unless you’re using the blog as your own personal diary.
Share Personal Opinions
Sharing a personal opinion is a great way to get your readers to interact on your blog through comments. Keep in mind that there are likely to be a wide variety of opinions on any given subject and not everyone will agree with you. Don’t worry about having a difference of opinion, as long as you aren’t attacking others; it’s all about pulling in traffic and getting people to talk.
Again, sharing your opinion doesn’t mean it’s a rant session. Say what you think and feel but invite your readers to do the same. And when they do, take time to comment. Be polite and encourage healthy dialogue. Your readers will come back again for engaging content and conversation.
Keep It Organized
Not only do you need to give your readers what they want, you also need to make sure they can find it. Most importantly, your blog should have a search field that allows visitors to search for a word or phrase on your blog. Make sure you assign categories to your articles so that they can easily be found. Give the reader every possible chance to find what they’re looking for or you might miss out.
It’s important to anticipate what your blog visitors want to read, meet those needs and show them exactly where they can find it through clear category names. The quicker they can find what they’re interested in, the more likely they are to continue to come back.
With these tips, you will have a well-balanced, informative and interesting blog that people want to read and share with their friends. Now all you need to do is come up with more original ideas for blog posts.
What advice do you have for giving your blog reader what they want?
About Matt Powers
Kikolani covers blog marketing and blogging tips for personal, professional, and business bloggers to succeed in search and social media marketing. Kristi Hines is a 
Great tips, Matt. I am a huge fan of sharing opinions. It’s exactly why people come back to your blog time and time again. A tip to consider is to create informative, useful content that people would naturally want to share with their friends.
Also, not every post will be a home run, but it’s that one post that you do that really gets your blog noticed. So keep shipping on your ideas and keep your content remarkable.
Joe Manna recently posted How to Crush Your Content Creation Hurdles and Create Remarkable Content Like a Boss
Great post.
I couldn’t agree more about the importance of knowing what your readers want. Understanding your audience is one of the most basic, but often forgotten about, principles of blogging. Whenever I’ve surveyed a group of readers I was always sure to ask for the types of content they wanted more of – more text, more video, more infographics, and more audio.
Another thing I’ve always found useful is competitive intelligence – survey what your competitors are doing, know what works, and find ways you can improve on it.
Again, thanks for the post.
Great tips, Matt. It’s so important to keep organized. Make sure your posts are categorized and tagged and your posts will be all the more “findable.”
Robert Koenig recently posted POM Wonderful Labels Deceptive Says FTC
Thanks Robert. I agree but I wouldnt go crazy on tags. A couple can be helpful but any more and I feel like it gets spammy. I think categories are most important.
Thanks Robert. I agree its great to be organized, however I tend to stick to categories more than tags. I find that the use of tags can get spammy. However 1 or 2 can be useful to help people find you
Matt Powers recently posted What I’m Thankful for This Year in SEO
I try to keep myself organised but it is just so difficult when you suffer from a condition as problematic as bipolar, you can wake up with all the greatest intentions in the world but something so trivial can throw it all out of the window.
Dean Saliba recently posted Important Things to Know About Financial Aid
The readers are the most important people in the whole equation since they are the ones who need to come back for more and share. Hence they need to be kept happy. Good quality content with lots of interesting stuff is required. I like the idea of sharing personal things or being personal, readers begin to trust you eventually.
Shalu Sharma recently posted Domestic Airlines in India
Exactly. If you wouldnt give it the time of day why would your audience. The more human and transparent you can be the better
Matt Powers recently posted What I’m Thankful for This Year in SEO
Another tip I would suggest is to add infographics to a blog. Some of your readers may engage better via the use of infographics rather than words so to have a mix of both should please both camps! Sometimes it is actually easier to explain something via the use of an image than with words anyway.
Suzanne Carter recently posted How To Make Your Website Form Engaging
Understanding your blog readers and giving them what they want is key. Apart from asking for engagement or doing up a poll will help you to understand your readers better, try to dig deep into your analytics data. What type of content are your readers spending time on? And this may vary depending on what search terms they used to discover your blog or which website did they come from.
Wayne Liew recently posted Apple iPad mini: 7 Reasons Why Business Owners Should Buy One
Do you have any other personal suggestions of how to continue to build relationships with your readers?
Also, I really like and appreciate the point that you shared of “Sharing a personal opinion”. I have found that this really works and has been a great benefit for me. Sometimes it does not matter if your right or wrong but just taking a stance give credit to what your about.
Thanks for sharing this list Matt, and hopefully we can connect since I read this post
!
Eric
Eric recently posted Winning For My Family–And For My Readers
Sharing your personal opinions is especially important. It’s the best way to keep your readers interested and stand out from the competition. Great post, Matt!
Matt Brennan recently posted Five Simple Tricks To Producing Lovable Content
Agreed Matt,
Relationships matters lot when we blogging, we have to engage & build a relationship with discussions, try to understand what readers want to read and at last opinion of audience, these are the few key points which you mention a blogger should follow.
Thanks for sharing..
To see what your readers need is always ask a question
Watching your comment area with clues can be another way to find if they are looking for a solution.
Thanks for the fine article Matt!
Samuel recently posted How To Make An Email List!
Hi there Matt thank you for the read:
My story is not unlike that of many bloggers. I’m constantly trying to work out what type of content I need to use. I have an idea of what people want unfortunately the information that I can provide is not the type of stuff that you lay out there for clients.
The bottom line is they don’t care about copyright, photographer’s rights, and how the Constitution and law applies to people in my line of work. They don’t care about the business side of photography contracts licensing agreements.
Now this is good information for someone in my line of work but client just doesn’t care and these are my strongest points.
I need to find “happy” information to share. Oh well perhaps in time.
Matt Powers’ article is much appreciated because I am always looking for tips to enhance traffic to my blog and improve readership. I especially appreciate that the points are clearly stated and easy to understand.
Len recently posted Entrepreneurs Will Want To Check This Out!
I am still working on sharing personal opinions on my blog. I guess it’s because I have a lot of stories I could share but I would definitely need to change details and names to avoid giving away sensitive client information.
Suzanne recently posted Financial Advisor Marketing Ideas: Create a Client Call List
Hey Matt,
One of my pet hates is going to someone’s blog only to find that I’m being attacked with adverts, floating sidebars, and toolbars!
It makes it difficult to navigate their blog and distracts you from actually reading the content, so back to your OP what I’m trying to say is keep your blog clean, easy to navigate, and uncluttered to make sure you keep your readers and entice news ones.
Cheers,
Mark
Mark Morphew recently posted Eclipse Link Cloaker
Awesome tips.
I like your point on answering questions your readers may have and turn that into a blog post to answer that question in detail.
If you have a list why not email your subscribers and ask them if they have any questions that you can answer for them?
The best question gets turned into a blog post:)
Jay recently posted Huge List Of 213 Clickable High Pagerank Backlinks For 2013
hello matt,
totally agree with you, building relationship is an essential part of blogging and there are various ways to do it. like commenting and guest posting . and the most effective way is to write quality content which our readers want. if we are providing quality content to our readers they will definitely come again and visit our blog. so there will be more chances for more sales. thanks for the post