In What Ways Do You Invest in Your Readers?
Daily Blog Tips did an interview with Lorelle VanFossen where Lorelle explains that blogging is a hobby for general bloggers. As with most hobbies, there is a certain cost involved to keep the hobby up. For example, if your hobby is photography, you must continue to buy equipment and printing services.
For the majority of bloggers, blogging will always be a hobby, regardless if some attempt at monetization is made. Besides the obvious investment of time, what are the other ways you invest in your readers?
The rest of this post will be what I consider some of my attempts at readership investment on other blogs as well as this one.
Quality Content
For me, posting once a day would be impossible. I would quickly burn myself out and run out of things to say rather quickly. One thing I attempt to do is to post when I really have something to say and attempt to put out that “quality content” that everyone seems to blog about lately.
Andrew Rickmann has a similar mindset with regards to content:
For me posting is directly related to my enthusiasm, I often feel that I should write something but I don’t want to write for the sake of it. Not because it would be a disservice to my readers, but because the result would be rubbish.
Stats Packages
Here at the Reader Appreciation Project, we have Mint installed. It enables all of the authors to determine which posts are the most popular, where the referrals are coming from, and some other miscellaneous statistics.
Stats packages are important to the readers indirectly in my opinion. It helps a blog author know what posts are not ringing well with readers (in terms of views) and also enables to blog author to see trends in traffic and/or reader behavior.
Another stats package I will try very soon is Crazy Egg. Crazy Egg enables you to see what readers are clicking on and what they aren’t. It’s a good way to not have to “guess” what readers are doing.
Hosting Packages
Another area of investment is that of a hosting package. Do your readers get shared hosting (such as with this site) or is your website on a dedicated server of some sort?
A lot of money a year could go into hosting. I thought paying a premium for web hosting would be more reliable, but I was wrong. I recently canceled my account with Media Temple (former host of my personal site) because of numerous reader complaints about downtime.
Theme Design
As with any blog software, some effort must be made in the design of the theme. With WordPress there are many free themes available.
After the first few months of RA Project, it became evident that in order to grow, a new design must be launched. Unfortunately, I’ve had other things come up to delay the design launch. Designing a theme from scratch is very time consuming, and sometimes it’s easier to just tweak a theme (such as with this current theme).
One of the things I personally am trying to avoid is to stop posting while the design is being worked on. A design is secondary to the content in my opinion. An analogy would be picture framing. The theme design is the actual frame. The content is the picture that goes in the frame. What’s more important, the picture, or the frame?
Contests
Another way to invest in the readership is to have contests. RA Project has yet to run a contest outside of Reader Appreciation Week simply because the blog is still young and is still growing a readership. Contests will come in due time hopefully.
ProBlogger has a useful tutorial on how to run a blog contest.
Communication
The last investment I will discuss is that of communication. Probably one of the bigger investments a blogger can make to the reader is that of communication. Communication helps build relationships, establish goodwill, and lets the reader know that he/she matters.
Here at RA Project, I try my best to respond to most comments (if applicable). A lot of times I don’t respond publicly and e-mail the commentator instead of making a comment. Sometimes I will email and comment. Other times I might not comment because I didn’t see the comment (with a multi-author blog, it’s tough to keep track of comments).
What Are Your Investments?
Thank you for reading the ways I try to invest in my readers. In what ways do you try to invest in your readers? I will try to do a follow-up post that will implement your suggestions.
Lorelle says...
Just to be clear, I did not say that blogging is a hobby “to me”. I was asked when a blogger should monetize their blog. My reply was “Never”. For those to whom blogging is a hobby, when you add ads, the blogging experience changes. For those to whom blogging is a business or part of their business, adding ads is part of the plan and process. The shift from hobby to business changes things, including how the blogger blogs, why, and what.
And I’m a little confused. I do not think that monetization is an investment in your readers. I think NOT having ads pays more respect to your readers than putting ads in their face. I’m having trouble making the connection.
There are a few other things on your list that have nothing to do with developing your blog’s relationships with readers. They don’t care about your web host nor statistics. Honestly. And there are some fabulous blogs on the free services like WordPress.com which cost the blogger nothing but time and energy, and the reader doesn’t care. They want the information not the story behind the information.
I’m not trying to be argumentative, I’d just like to understand your reasoning behind this. Maybe I’m missing something important. Thanks.
Ronald Huereca says...
Hi Lorelle,
Here are my responses to your questions:
Hosting is extremely important because when a site is down, readers cannot get to the content. As I stated in my example, my site was unfortunately down and I had to switch hosts to satisfy my readers’ demands. In the case of WordPress.com blogs, this is hardly an issue fortunately.
I never mentioned monetization or ads in my post with regards to investment.
Stats packages are beneficial at least to me because I feel I can give a readers a better experience knowing what they react or fail to react to.
The examples I gave in the post pertain to myself and is an invitation to readers (such as yourself) to weigh in on what they feel are investments. One example you mentioned is to not have ads, which is a great way to invest in your readers.
I have updated the post to reflect the misquote. It was a mere attempt at an introduction that blogging is a hobby. Thank you for weighing in.
Are there any other ways you can think of to invest in readers?
Lorelle says...
Thank you for the correction of the misquote. Yes, having your site down makes it difficult for people to contact you, which risks losing readers if it persists. However, it is more of an administration issue than an investment in the readers, in my point of view.
As for the issue at hand, you’ve mentioned the issue of monetization, which a lack of is seen as a benefit to many readers just as too many is a detriment to the entire validity of the blog, not just the readership.
Stats tell you what visitors are interested in and what brings visitors to your blog. It doesn’t tell you what they return for. That’s harder to measure and more important.
Personally, I believe that consistency in content, accuracy in content, and reliability (which could apply to web hosts) in content and form does a lot to encourage readers to return. When they know they will consistently get the best information you have to offer, they come to rely upon you for the duration of their need.
Investments in readers come from providing your content via multiple sources such as feeds, email feeds (newsletter replacements), a blog’s design meeting accessibility and web standards so it can be viewed by anything from anywhere by anyone, translation access for international readers, and easy search and navigation features to help them delve deeper into your blog content to find the answers they need to their questions, now and in the future.
I’m sure I missed some and I’m looking forward to seeing what others have to say on the subject.