5. Interact with Readers using Interactive Blog Tools such as :
Chat rooms ~ Newsletters/Mailing Lists ~ Guest Maps ~ Forums ~ Discussion Boards ~ Polls etc.
In addition to these tools you might want to consider making yourself contactable by posting your email address – beware of spam if you post it as a link. One way around this is to have a Contact Form. You might also post your instant messenger ID (but again be aware this means you might get anyone messaging you!)
Other people encourage people to comment by featuring ‘recent comments’ or ‘most prolific commenters’ in their side bar. This gives some added incentive to post comments.
Be selective in how many of the above tips you implement. A common mistake is to give you readers too many ways to interact with you and have ‘bells and whistles’ just for the sake of having lots of features. This will clutter your page and confuse your reader.
The level and type of interaction of your blog is up to you. It will depend upon your personality, content and willingness to put time into interacting with your readers. In my opinion the benefits are worth the effort.
Don’t put any of the above tools on your blog unless you yourself are willing to use them in interacting with your readers. If you don’t have the time or energy to talk back – don’t advertise the fact that you do.
f you interact with your readers they are more likely to put some time aside to come back and engage with you – its just human nature.
6. Update frequently – With the advent of news aggregators people can be notified of your new post in real time. Of course this only works if you have an RSS feed (get one!) and have readers who use aggregators. Update regularly and give your readers a reason to come back regularly. You’ll also find that the Search Engine bots will come visiting more often if your site is constantly changing.
Also related to this is the hits that come when you ping sites like weblogs.com or technorati. These sites keep track of changes on websites – the more you update the more you will ping them (if your blogging tool enables pinging) and the more they will take notice of you and include you in their lists.
7. Search engines – The longer your blog is active and the more you post the higher the chance of a search engine like Google or Yahoo referring visitors to your site. There are a lot of theories of how to boost your ranking on search engines floating around the web but an obvious starting place is to submit your blog’s domain to them so that they’ll start listing you.
Getting listed – There are a lot of services out there that will do it for you (for a fee) – but there are also some free services (which claim to submit your site to a smaller amount of search engines).
You can also go directly to many search engines and register for a free listing.
8. Add a signature to your outgoing email – Many bloggers do this. Simply add the domain name to your outgoing email. Most email programs will allow you to do this automatically. However be careful with automatic signatures if you don’t want your blog to be read by everyone that you email
posted originally by http://www.problogger.net
