5 Ways to lose blog readers

Write too many sponsored posts in too shorter space of time. Sponsored posts are great; bloggers earn a little, the company your writing about gets some attention, the sponsor gets some money (from the company) and the reader has something to read, so why is it dangerous?

It’s simple. Sponsored posts often do not reflect the bloggers real views. This is especially common in new bloggers who do not understand this. They just want the cash regardless of whether they loose some readers because they are overly-flattering in their post. It is especially dangerous if you have not properly researched and spent time using what ever you are reviewing. You should all know by now that you must be careful about what you endorse. Just imagine... your reputation would be left in tatters if an affiliate program you recommended suddenly closed it's doors for no reason and you and your referrals lost all their earnings. Some sites do allow you to write negative reviews, but this is only useful if you are actually going to use the site and find out it's bad points; which you are less likely to do if you are writing a sponsored post every day.
Note - I am including posts about affiliate/referral programs here, because in the long run they are sponsored posts.



Not replying to your blog comments.. Not only will this piss of your readers and make them feel little and insignificant but it’s just plain stupid. There are numerous benefits of replying to your comments.
Benefits
• A comment may be suggesting an improvement you could make to your blog. Even if you carry out their advice, replying makes it more obvious you are open to criticism and makes them feel happy because they have said something useful. This means they are more likely to return to your blog to get more of that feeling!
• First time visitors to your blog often judge it by the number of comments they see (which is a sort of very rough traffic/popularity guide). If you reply to your comments that number will be higher, especially if you spark of a debate. If they see a high number of comments they may request a link exchange, or just become regular readers. It may seem like a small point but it all adds up.
• Some comments are questions. You wouldn’t want your reader (who thinks you know the answer!) to lose faith in you, so answer their questions!
• Some comments are compliments, which we all love. Saying a quick 'thank you' is polite and encourages more compliments to come your way.
• Some comments are spam. Don't reply, delete them.
• Your more knowledgeable readers may disagree with what you have said and spark off a debate. If you don't reply it looks like you are hiding from them. It also shows your expertise if you can come up with arguments to counter what they have said.




By hiding things from them. This is a very broad category and has several possible interpretations.
a) If you are a successful blogger throw a rope down the mountain and help your readers to the top with you. After all, that’s probably how you got to the top.
b) Lying about affiliate programs - this is covered in part 1.
c) Your earnings. This is especially relevant to blogs in this niche. Why pretend to have earned more/less than you really have? I know some people out there are apparently 'offended' by revealing their blogging earnings, but if you are then this probably isn't the niche for you.

I try to be as open as possible about this blogs progress, which I why I make a Weekly earnings report and a Google Analytics Weekly overview.



By making your archives difficult to access. In my opinion this is the single biggest limitation of blogger blogs, (the lack of categories). I have tried to get around this by referring to past articles as a write but there are some that hardly ever get linked to. This is most important for the regular readers of your blog. Most of my 'new visitors' don't arrive to the homepage of this blog, but emerge somewhere in the archives so Google has done a good job of indexing them all.




By cluttering up your site with ads. This is an obvious one, multiple big banner ads are a no-no, and too much AdSense will send your readers in the other direction. There are ways of integrating ads so they don't stand out so much (which also gets you more clicks). For an example of this see my post on Kontera. Banner ads have been 'scientifically' proven to get less click through than Text Link Ads and too many banners on a single pages results in one long loading time for people with slower connections. This is true for all images so don't include too many.

Those are the 5 ways to lose blog readers. There are others of course but hopefully the basics are covered there. Many of them are pure common sense but you would be surprised how many people fall fowl of them. Number 1 is the most prevalent in my opinion, because the authors see it as a sort of 'happy medium' between a site full of ads and a site that provides a service so make sure you spread sponsored posts out.

Traffic Exchange Programs

Traffic exchange programs have been around for longer than I can remember (admittedly that’s not long...). Over the last month or so I have been playing around with a few of them to see it they are worth all the attention they get. For those of you who are unfamiliar with traffic exchange programs, they are very simple. You sign up, create an account and enter the URL of your site/s. Normally there is an option to 'surf for credits', which involves browsing the other sites listed in their database. After a given time on one site (e.g. 30 seconds) you can click a button that takes you to the next one. You earn 'credits' for each site you surf which are converted into hits for your site. There are usually other ways to acquire credits but these depend on which site you use and vary from buying credits to earning them by making referrals.

With what I have said to far you probably think they sound great, but there must be a reason why we don't do them all the time. Here are a few pros and cons of traffic exchange programs.

Pros
- Bring targeted traffic to your site at no cost to you apart from your time. (Unless you chose the paid option).

- Expose you to more websites, some of which may be interesting/useful.

- Can be fairly effective for gaining referrals for online schemes, because the users of the traffic exchange program will be web users and possibly affiliate marketers.

- You don't actually have to read the page you are surfing to earn the credits. I confess I often have a traffic exchange programs running while I am doing something else and I just check back occasionally and click the button to earn the credits.

Cons
- It is against many advertising programs TOS, namely Google AdSense to have a site on a traffic exchange program. In my opinion this is the single biggest con.

- The traffic may be targeted, but as I said you don't have to read the page to earn the credits so many people won't even read anything of what you have written.

- People learn to filter out the crap AND its BORING!. Meaning that on the rare occasions I surf 'properly' and read what I am browsing, I cannot help but be sickened by all the crap and spammy worthless pages that are floating around on these programs. This normally results in me switching off and just mindlessly clicking the button. If you want to know what its like to be a robot performing mindless repetitive takes you will love traffic exchanges.

- The presence of so many worthless sites shows that lots of the people using them are worthless as well lol. i.e. they couldn’t build a site of value if they tried so do you really want them to be your referral?

- Some of the sites are 'dodgy' and do who knows what to your computer. Many of the sites I have surfed using these programs have made my computer go REALLY slow for a while and do other nasty things to it, I have reported the sites that did this but there are still a lot out there, so beware.


Ok so those are a few pros and cons. I am a member of these 3 traffic exchange programs.

TrafficG - If I must pick a favourite this would be it. The credits earned here get used up very quickly, which shows that they have the most users. This means they there is the potential to surf all day and not build up a surplus of credits so you can get the most traffic with TrafficG. They also have the best quality traffic because the minimum surf time is 30 seconds. As well as that they also have a decent system where you get rewarded with a better ‘credits – hits’ ratio if you do a lot of surfing.

Blog Mad - have a minimum surf time 25 seconds which I suppose is a happy medium. However they do seem to have fewer users and I have been able to build up a stockpile of credits too easily.

AdSence Elite Team - have a minimum surf time of juts 10 seconds with makes surfing feel more productive but the quality of traffic you will receive will be much lower.

All in all there is not a huge difference between the different programs. If you are really going to get stuck into traffic exchange programs it would be best to use all three anyway. Also do not think these are the only ones, there are plenty more out there.

My advice would be to only use traffic exchange programs in the very early stages of your blog, if at all. There are lots of other more effective and rewarding ways of getting traffic, like building quality content. If you don't have a developed site and you are just promoting one affiliate program then you may find them more useful, but remember you cannot have AdSense ads if you do use one .

Networking - Generate Traffic and Links

A useful and rewarding way of generating traffic and links to your site is by networking. In this case this means contacting webmasters who have a similar topic of yours and 'requesting a partnership' with them.

I have done this by using Technorati. I searched for blogs, which have similar content and had MORE authority. There is no point putting effort to get links from sties that have less authority than yours. It is important to aim high, but ACHIEVEABLY high. e.g. if your site has 20 inbound links, it would be best to contact webmasters with around 40 - 100 inbound links. A Webmaster with over a 1000 links probably wouldn’t pay any attention to you. (Note - it is also the authority of their links which is important, so be sure to check their Technorati ranking as well).

When you contact other webmasters, be friendly, but do not offer things you will not do. For example you could offer to write a short review of their site which a couple of links to their site on it, and then suggest that they could link to it once you have written it.

The general rule is: Be good to them and they will be good to you.

You have to genuinely care about their success, you may find they put multiple links to your site and even recommend it if it is of good quality content.

Writing a review might sound like a lot more work than just putting a link to them in a list on your sites menu; but the review will end up in your archive, so it will not take the most prominent position on your page for long (not to mean it wont ever be read again).

Networking partners also may be interested in your affiliate programmes. They may sign up without you even asking if your posts about the programmes are good enough. If you are very good to them they may sign up, or they may offer to join yours if you join theirs.

Networking is therefore a very useful tool, in getting traffic, links (resulting is traffic due to the search engines smiling on them) and in possible affiliates.