This may seem like not such an important tip, but a great theme can go a long way in keeping visitors on your blog when they visit. First, think about your audience and the type of blog you are creating and match that up with the theme design. Make sure you check for great typography in the theme, check for font hierarchy, line spacing, line length and readability. Blogs are mostly about reading, if your readers find your articles easy to read, they will most likely return for more. Consider buying a premium theme that has most of the features you need, already coded into the back-end/framework. You can get great premium themes from WooThemes and Themeforest, they feature great themes for all types of blogs. There are also a lot of free themes available, a great place to search is Smashing Magazine.

When you are writing articles, think to yourself, “would I read this if I found it on the net?” and “Does this line up with the mission of my blog?”. Writing articles that relate to your blog is very important, because you not only want to bring in new readers, but you also want to keep the readers you have already, so stick to whatever niche you are interested in.

It’s important to write often,  if your readers find your articles interesting, they will be coming back for more. Search engines love an updated blog, it is not good when two or three months have passed and the same old news is still on your front page. If you are not a daily blogger, keep a consistent schedule of when you will be making your blog post, eg. set specific days of the week that you will be consistently publishing new content (Days of the week can also be broken down into categories), your readers will get accustomed to your RSS feed sending out articles on those days. As a general rule, do not publish articles on the weekend, most of your readers are away from their computers, you want to publish your post when you have the most chance, of  as much readers as possible  being notified.

Repetition is one of those important rules of design that you should use to affect how your readers respond to your blog. Consistency makes your articles look more professional and gives the reader an unconscious sense of security. The blog design and CSS takes care of most of that, but you can also help by:

It is very important to reply to the comments placed on your blog, your readers take the time to comment on your articles, replying is a great way to carry on the conversation, sometimes readers have more to say, but if you don’t respond, they may never come back or they may think your blog is dead or not being moderated. I don’t think you have to respond to every comment, but read the comments and if it merits a reply, by all means do so.

Get in the habit of reading and interacting on other blogs in your niche, The benefits are very rewarding, you will soon find that other authors and visitors are visiting your blog and commenting on your articles; you may also come across very interesting articles that inspire you. It is also a great way to build recognition around the web and soon, many people will know about you and your blog. This tip is one of the most important, just remember not to spam other blogs with comments. Comment genuinely to articles you are interested in.

Joining a network can be very beneficial in getting readers to know about your blog. A blog network is a network of many blogs partnering together to share the best content in their niche, the network is hosted by one of the more popular blogs in the network and the articles are shared through one RSS feed. This saves time for you, because your articles are aggregated automatically by the network. Networks also help to promote articles and increase traffic to your site and the host site.

Submitting your articles is extremely important if you want readers to find your articles on the net. First make sure you have good SEO and Pinging plugins installed, this will take care of getting your websites out to the search engines and prevent it from being banned by ping networks. After each post, go ahead and submit your articles to social networks. You can use Addthis Firefox plugin to do manual submissions, you can also place social bookmarking buttons beneath your post,  for your readers to use.

These are just a couple of simple steps to take and, as you can see, they are very practical. Don’t expect over night success, keep creating great articles and overtime you will see all your work paying off in increased visits to your blog and visitor interactions. If the work gets overwhelming, seek help from a friend, family member or if your blog is generating enough money, you can hire someone to take care of some of the simple task. What are some of the things you did to make your blog successful? Please feel free to share them in the comments area below.