By directing visitors around your blog you can increase visitor retention. But how do you steer them and where do you steer them? Read on!

Steering visitors around your blog is an essential trick that will help to increase the success of your blog. Look at is as guiding your visitors to where you want them to go to increase your targets.

The Aim Of Flowing Your Visitors
To increase the value and success of your blog you need readers every day and lots of them! This is basically acheived through making sure visitors that arrive to read a post go on to read a second post and so on.

Once your visitor has read a few posts they become interested in you and what you have to say. They will hopefully then take an interest in the products that you want to promote and maybe even start to follow your new posts and come back.

Therefore, the aim is rather than a visitor finding your blog and reading a single post before leaving, you want them to read a handful of pages and then commit to returning. A single visitor creating one page view becomes a loyal reader creating loads of page views.

Create The Flow
So how do you do this? Well, not for a start by listing most recent posts as your main navigation! This information is neither use nor ornament and I recommend that you replace your recent posts links with a most popular posts link instead. New visitors are not bothered about your most recent work, but if you can showcase your best writing then they might take an interest and start reading these.

If they get to the bottom of your post then give them something else to read. Try one of the many excellent related posts plugins available. If they have enjoyed reading your article about widgets and you have more similar articles on offer, then make sure they can find them. Do not leave them hunting for the information that they do not know exists.

Where To Flow Your Visitors To
After they have read a few posts and established for themselves that you are worthwhile reading, give them a way of finding you easily again. RSS links are scattered about the page, but make sure that they are mentioned in key areas – such as clearly at the bottom of the article. Present your RSS feed in the same style as the body of the article and they might just read it automatically. Separate it by a horizontal line and in different text and they probably will totally ignore it.

Many people know how to use RSS, but what about those that do not? For these people there is no harm running an email newsletter. With these you also get the opportunity to include further information that they might not see, such as latest offers. Offer Facebook and Twiter as well as alternative ways of following your latest information.

All of these methods need to be presented to your readers at the right time – just when they want to use them. Make sure that they are clear on the page when they have read the post, when they are most open to following you.

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