I’d like us to be honest with one another for a moment if you don’t mind. None of us spends hours each day updating and maintaining our blogs because we hope that no one will read them. We’re not 8 year old girls who are secreting our hearts desires away in a dog-eared diary. Fact of the matter is that each and every article you write is a reflection of your heart and soul poured out for all to see. There’s only one thing worse than people not seeing it, and that’s people seeing it but not responding in any way whatsoever to it. That is the ultimate blow to our egos. It means that it just wasn’t good enough.

We can all agree that getting traffic is easy. Drop your blogs name in a few places and you will start to get traffic. Get it bookmarked on a few social bookmarking sites and your traffic will have a memorable spike. To what end though? If people see your site, but aren’t impressed enough by it to do anything except move hurriedly along to the next one what does a spike in traffic accomplish? I suppose it might be nice to see your traffic break the previous days record, but for me personally I desire something more than that. I want to build a relationship with my readers.

Step 1: Courting your readers

Statistically speaking you have about 10 seconds to court a new reader to your site. You have to convince them in that short span of time that your site is worth pursuing. Don’t worry about hooking them as a lifetime “customer” to your site in those 10 seconds. The only thing you need to do is convince them to give you a chance.

There are a few key points that happen during those first 10 seconds. In order to even begin building a relationship with your readers you must address these points immediately.

• Visual appeal – Canadian researchers have shown a judgment on visual appeal occurs within a 20th of a second. Literally in the blink of an eye.
  

  One of the key things to realize when designing your layout, or using a pre-made one is that almost without exception the human eye tracks to the upper left corner of the website immediately upon opening the page.

• Usability – No matter how visually appealing a site might be if it is not easily used people will leave it in droves.
  

  If the site isn’t useful and functional your visitors will only stay long enough to figure that out no matter how visually appealing it might be.

• The “what’s in it for me” syndrome – The first thing that nearly all website viewers ask themselves is “what’s in it for me?”. In other words we want to know almost immediately what we will get out of the experience.
  

  You don’t need to lay it all out for the viewer at this point, but there has to be something that compels your readers to go forward and not back or close out altogether. I used to be a coder on a MUD (acutally I still am I just don’t do anything there anymore). Long and short I designed and coded areas for players to explore and play in. That is when I first learned about this principal. I had to reward the players and convince them to venture into my area. Then I had to reward them for going forward in the area despite great in-game peril to their characters. Same principal holds true with a blog (except for the peril part, I hope). You need to reward your readers and convince them to venture forward.

As you can see those three things occur in a very short amount of time. In less than 5 seconds a person will determine if they like or don’t like the website. It hardly seems fair, but we all do it. We pass judgment, good or bad, within seconds. That shouldn’t really be a suprise when you consider that first impressions are lasting impressions.

The next five seconds are nearly as critical as the first five. Except generally people are done with their initial reaction to your site by that time. If they’ve stayed there’s now a decent chance they’ll actually look around a bit. At this point your goal is to catch their eye with your headline. That’s why writing good headlines is essential to blogging. If everything else checks out but the headline stinks you can bet I will move along, and you do it too.

Another reason it is so important to have a good great headline is because often other sites will link to yours using your headline as an anchor tag. If they link to you using it and it was poorly written you’ll lose traffic because, well why would I trust you to write a good article when you can’t even be bothered to write a good headline? You can bet I’m not going to trust the site that linked to you when I can see perfectly well that you don’t take things seriously.

Step 2: Promoting community

How often have you read through a few posts on a blog and found you simply had nothing to say about the subject matter? Personally it has never happened with me, but I can’t count the number of times that I’ve not said anything. Why? Because the author of the blog left no room for interaction. If they asked questions they answered them, or even worse they didn’t ask a question they simply espoused their commentary. Do you feel invited to get involved in a monologue? I certainly don’t.

Fortunately fixing the problem is easier than you think. Edward Dowd from The Blog Beat wrote a guest post over at Blogging Tips which covers one method of people to feel like part of the community. That is by commenting. You can link to the article to get the details but the highlighted points are as follows.

• Evoke Emotion
• Comment on non-popular blogs
• Ask a Question
• Stay on Point
• Make Your Own Comments
• Take comment from other places

Beyond commenting there is a whole array of possibilities to create a community atmosphere on your blog. Even something as simple as having a Mybloglog.com account with a sidebar widget showing visitors will go a long way. Psychologically it is very appealing for a person to see their “face” (in this case avatar) somewhere. Beyond that there are all kinds of “little things” you can do to invoke a sense of community. A few ideas I’ve had while I’ve been writing this post include:

• Get a random ad rotator and every now and then instead of flashing an ad flash up a graphic that tells the reader how much you appreciate them. Sounds cheesy I know, but go take a look at Bryan’s comments at One Man’s Goal and realize how much traffic he generates being such a young blog. It is largely due to how much appreciation he shows for his readers. I don’t know what his repeat traffic is like, but I’m willing to bet that it’s not to shabby.
• Try to write in a conversational tone if at all possible. I’m not there to be lectured I’m there to learn something. If you’re writing is to brisk I might learn what I need to learn, but why would I go back?
• Invite people back. Do you ever remember going to someone’s house and they were perfectly gracious, well mannered, and jovial and at the end of the visit as you were driving off you realized that they never once said something like We’ll have to make plans for the next time you come, or It was great seeing you I can’t wait to do this again? If you’ve ever experienced this kind of thing you know what I’m talking about. You very well may be perfectly welcome in their homes, but without the invitation you don’t feel it. Same principal holds true with an online community. People are much more likely to come back if they are invited back.

Promoting a sense of community is one of the easiet things you can do, but in the long run it pays off the best. Take a few minutes a think of ways you can help to promote community on your own blog. I’d love for you to share a few of your ideas with other readers in a comment. Better yet would be a post on your own blog talking about it.

Step 3: Following through

Alright, so now you’ve gotten a few readers and you’re taking steps to build a community. That’s great, and I’m glad you’ve done that, but now you need to actually get to work. Building a house is hard work, but maintaining a family is thousands of times harder. That’s exactly what the point of following through is. To maintain that family, that community you have built. More than maintaining it you are working to increase it. When I speak in terms of follow through I’m talking about specific actions that I as an outsider can measure.

• Do you respond to comments? This is especially important when you have an icon such as “I Reply”, or “U Comment I Follow”. If you indicate that you will reply to a comment then everyone reading your site has an expectation that you will do just that. If you find you can’t (or don’t want to) that’s fine, but don’t leave the icon up because that gives your readers a certain expectation.
• If you indicate you are writing about a particular subject in a future post please be certain to either get it posted or revise what you said. If I read a blog posting from you and it say “I’m in the process of gather data about whale eating pigeons for a future article” I’m expecting to see an article about whale eating pigeons. And I’m expecting to see it relatively soon. Perhaps that’s an unfair expectation, but by mentioning it you set yourself up for that expectation.
• Return the favor by visiting their site and leaving a comment if at all possible. Granted that can be tough, but this really goes to the core of building a community. In fact this tip could very easily be in the promoting community section above, but I decided that it was more of a follow up item. By visiting their community and commenting you are actually planting a seed in not only their minds, but the minds of their readers. So instead of building your own community by one single person you are potentially doing it with thousands.

I’ll end with a question for you. If you choose to answer please either do so in the ocmment section below or by sending me an email with your answer. The question is – Do you spend more time building relationships, or more time thinking of content to write about?