How Reader-Friendly Is Your Blog?

The idea behind growing your blog's readership is simple: in order to grow, you need to gain new readers faster than you lose the ones you already have.

You probably put a lot of thought into the first element and do a lot of work to expose your blog to new readers.  Commenting on other blogs, sending Twitter updates, giving some link love and getting some back, things like that.  (All things I still need to get better at, and about which I would love to have some guest posts…)

But what do you have to do to keep your current readers?  In terms of content, this means giving them the same types of posts that made them readers in the first place, while at the same time keeping things fresh.  With this post though, I'm more interested in the technical things you can do to serve your readers, which is almost always worth more than the extra pageviews you might get (for a little while) by complicating things.

Make Your Readers' Lives Easy

When I first started blogging, my mindset was all wrong.  I was very focused on the pageviews statistic, and I thought that increasing that number was the goal.  The trouble with that approach was that it led me to do some things that made reading my blog less convenient.  For example, I figured that if I posted at random times rather than at a consistent time each day, I'd get more views by forcing readers to check the blog multiple times throughout the day to see if I had posted fresh content.

I have since realized that readers deserve much better than that.  If they're taking the time to read my blog, then I owe it to them to make reading it as easy as possible.  (I still don't manage to post at the same time every day, but at least I try!)  The fact is, if your blog is new, pissing off readers to get more pageviews or more ad clicks is a big mistake.  You simply cannot afford to lose readers at this stage, and the few extra pageviews you might get from making them have to click around more is not worth that risk.

The number I focus on now is subscribers, the number of people who have in some way signed up to receive my feed in an RSS reader.  It's true that subscribers who just read your feeds don't count towards your pageview statistics (unless you make it hard for them by showing only partial posts in your feed).  But a healthy subscriber number means you're making readers happy.  Subscribers are likely to be your biggest fans, and the more of these you have, the better.

By the way, if you don't know your subscriber number, check out Feedburner, where you can customize your feed and get consolidated statistics about your readership.

Here's a quick list of things you can do to make life easy for your readers.  Some of these things will actually decrease your pageviews in the short term, but that's exactly the point.  The less readers have to fumble around on your site, the happier they'll be.  And as your subscriber number grows, you'll be happier too.

• Display multiple posts on the front page of your blog. Don't make readers click to see the post they missed yesterday, or worse, the newest one.  Display a few posts in their entirety, right there on the front page.  On the front page of No Meat Athlete, I choose to show the most recent three posts and excerpts of the next seven.  If you're a self-hosted Wordpress user, the Homepage Excerpts plugin can help with this.
• Display entire posts in your feed. Many readers simply WILL NOT SUBSCRIBE to your feed if they have to click through when they want to read your entire post.  What other reason do you need?
• Set your links so that they open in the same window. Yes, you'll be "sending readers away from your blog."  But generally, people don't like popups and having a bunch of windows open.  Certainly there are times when a new window is more appropriate, and there are some readers who like having links open in new tabs or windows.  But they usually know they can do this with any link by holding in CTRL when they click.
• On individual post pages, provide links to the next and previous posts. Bonus: this one will actually increase your pageviews.  If your theme doesn't automatically do this, it's usually easy to copy/paste in the appropriate code to make it happen.
• Include links to related posts, so your readers don't have to search around to find them. You can do this manually, or with a plugin like Yet Another Related Posts.
• Provide a "Best-of" list. Make it easy for potential readers to find your best stuff.  I do this in the sidebar, but you could even create a separate page for this purpose.  This is also great for search engine optimization.
• Post at a consistent time each day. If readers know that they'll find fresh content when they sign on to read, they'll be more likely to keep coming back.
• Make subscribing easy. Get a "subscribe" button, and make sure it's easy to find.
• Take it easy with the ads! One reason I don't like AdSense is that you only get paid when people click your ads.  The way to get more clicks, of course, is to place the ads in or near your content.  The result: unhappy readers.  I prefer ads that pay-per-view, like those served by Foodbuzz, since they don't have to be quite as conspicuous to earn money.

So there you go.  Keep your readers happy, and they'll keep you happy.  What do you do to make it easy for them that I haven't listed?