What do all successful internet marketers and online business owners have in common? They have a loyal list of subscribers, or a mailing list, that they can use to draw REPEAT visitors back to their website over, and over, and over (okay, you get the picture) again. But first…

Jonathan Beebe from the Online Income Blog shares how he achieved blogging success and made money from having repeat visitors on his blog.

Why Should You Care About Repeat Visitors?

It’s been proven time and time again that most of the people who visit your website DON’T follow through with your intended course of action. Even worse, they NEVER return to your website. Don’t believe me? Take a look at your stats.

It’s not necessarily that you have bad content, or that they are uninterested in what you have to offer. There are a lot of scenarios that could cause a would-be client/customer to click off of your website and never return.

For example, what if they came across your blog, thought it was interesting but had to get ready for work right away? Sure, maybe they planned on returning later, but that’s easy for anyone to forget — no matter how remarkable your blog was.

However, if you were to encourage them to either subscribe to your feed, or to enter their email address, YOU could then remind them about your website by sending them quality content on a regular basis (what you’re already doing on your blog, right?!).

For that reason, along with the fact that it’s been proven most people need to see what you have to offer before they do anything, should be more than enough reason for you to CARE about attracting repeat visitors to your blog or website.

What Repeat Visitors Did For My Business

When I first started online, I didn’t really care too much about attracting repeat visitors. Sure, I’ve always heard “the money is in the list,” but I wasn’t willing to pay monthly fees for an autoresponder since I really didn’t know what to do with my list once I started building it.

Needless to say, my “online business” (if you could call it that back then) was making close to nothing because I was relying on “hit and run” traffic to make my money online (or lack thereof). Hit-and-run traffic are the people who come to your site and never return.

Long story short, I found a way to encourage my readers to give me their name and email address, built my list, and a relatively short time after I accomplished two of my main goals:

1. I quit my job to work full-time online.
2. I can fully support my family with the income I make online (so my wife wouldn’t have to work either).

Start Building Your Readers’ Trust

Like I said, one of the main reasons I avoided “building my list” was that I had no idea what to do with my list once I got one. I didn’t want to be like the “gurus” and send promotion after promotion – I knew that would just cause people to unsubscribe (since I’m not a “guru” myself).

So instead, I decided to do everything I could to increase the chances of people trusting me. After all, if people trust me, then they will also be more willing to purchase what I recommend to them (affiliate sales, and my own products), as well as take the advice I was posting on my blog.

So here’s what I did, and what you should do to start retaining your visitors right away:

• Create a short, free report related to your niche (could be as long or short as you want, just make sure it’s useful).
• Put an opt-in form on your blog that will give your report away to your visitors in exchange for their first name and email address (your autoresponder will give you the code you need for this).
• Now, every six days or so, send them your latest useful blog post, except every THIRD mailer…
• On every THIRD mailer, send them a link to a product that you recommend, or a review for a product that you are affiliated with. Make sure it’s a high quality product though or people will unsubscribe!

What’s Supposed to Happen Next?

If you follow that schedule above every single week as you continue to post to your blog regularly, you’ll start noticing a few positive things happening.

1. First, your traffic will increase on a regular basis without any extra effort on your part… and it’ll be the best type of traffic: repeat visitors.
2. Also, your profit will always increase as your list grows. With the 6-day schedule I just described, you’ll have an average of 1-2 promotional mailers go out every month (with high quality article mailers going out way more often than that). I guarantee that the days your “promo” mailers go out, they will be your most profitable days… especially as your list grows.
3. You’ll also notice that your “unsubscribe rate” will be very low, and your “open rate” will be very high because your subscribers will be used to getting high quality information from you.

If you don’t want to promote to your mailing list, that’s fine too, just use your list as a way to drive traffic to your blog. Whenever I post a good article to my blog and announce it to my list, I always get a huge spike in traffic that day. And guess what? Most of them are repeat visitors (once again, very valuable).

Start Retaining Your Visitors Now

So if that’s not enough to convince you that repeat visitors are what you should be striving for, then I don’t know what will! However, a business (whether online or offline), is about testing and seeing what really works well for you.

So don’t take my word for it – try it out for yourself! Build your list in the manner I described above for six months to a year, and tell me if it doesn’t improve your “making money online” and/or blogging efforts ten-fold!

Related posts:

1. Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Start Blogging V2.0

2. How Making Money Blogging Has Been Looked at the Wrong Way by Thousands of Bloggers

3. Blogging Resources Improve Search Engine Traffic

I have written hundreds of posts over the last few months on a variety of blogs.  In fact, my role on Blogussion is primarily to write great content and promote our blog. Alex also writes awesome content and has insane design abilities.

Together we are building Blogussion’s brand by connecting with our readers and networking with hundreds of other bloggers.  Our goal is for Blogussion to be the source of great content on blogging tips.  Reaching our goal requires us to promote our content to everyone on the internet.  Today, I am going to explain our #1 source for bringing in new traffic.

Guest Posting Strategy

Let me first explain the most important part of our strategy when it comes to guest posting… sitting down and doing it!  This isn’t going to be the first time many bloggers have heard of guest posting.  If it is or isn’t your first time, listen up and get ready to do some serious promotion.  Guest posting is the best way to get new subscribers and more traffic.

Why Guest Post?

Bloggers spend a lot of time worrying about traffic and trying a variety of different methods.  Some work great and others just take a lot of your energy away from other important things.  The majority of traffic methods usually lead to bloggers wasting valuable time instead of writing new content or seriously promoting their work.  Many of the methods are not even worth the efforts made to use them.

After trying everything, guest posting is the single most effective way to build traffic to your blog.

Promoting your blog is hard and can be very frustrating.  You tweet, stumble, digg and comment all over the internet and still your blog seems to find little change in readership.  Eventually you dive into SEO and try to learn more about keyword rich titles and content. You know links are important, but you’re scratching your head as to how to get more of them.  You have heard about guest posting but for some reason you are too scared, too tired, or not aware of the powerful results.

Personally I learned the power of guest posting when I started blogging for a new site.  The blog was only a week old but I had produced 30 quality posts to launch the blog.  With the help of some of my blogging buddies, and the start of search engine traffic trickling in I began my promotion methods the very first day I began blogging.  Here’s what I did to turn a new blog into a busy blog.

Research Your Niche

I knew from previous experience what blogs were important in my current niche (topic) so I went to five of the top blogs and began reading their posts.  While reading their posts I asked myself these 10 important questions:

1. What exactly are they writing about on this blog?
2. Is there content similar to my content?
3. Would their readers be interested in what I write?
4. What topics are they currently writing on?
5. Are there any ways to elaborate further on recent posts?
6. Are there any major post topics they are missing?
7. Do they use guest posts?
8. What style of writing do they use?
9. How can I use my background and blog uniquely in their content?
10. Are my experiences useful to their readers?

Photo by Stefan Baudy

Asking these questions and answering them honestly will help you come to the conclusion of whether or not the blog is worth guest posting on.  To many of you I give this advice… I can find a way to fit ANY blog topic into a post for ANY other blog, and so can you.  If you need help, just go to the contact page and let me know what blog you want to write for and what help you need.

Once you have a few big blogs to write on… get out a piece of paper, whiteboard, or open a document and start writing post ideas.  You should brainstorm as many post ideas that would fit with the guest posting blog as you possibly can.  Then start to narrow the posts down into posts you think are most interesting and easily researched/written.

How to Guest Post

Writing is the next step.  First begin with an outline of major points for the blog post ideas you liked best.  Really try hard to get the main point of your post idea in the outlines you write.  Then look for the posts with the clearest outlines and most interesting topics.  Start thinking of stories, analogies, web tools, images, or anything else which could compliment your post.  Then do some research on the topic to make sure your opinion is correct, or at least arguable.

The next step is different for many bloggers, so choose carefully.  Your options are to either email the owner of the blog with your proposal to guest post, main point (one sentence), brief outline, and contact information to see if it is worth writing up, or you can go ahead and write the entire thing.

I have done both and found that emailing a very brief and succinct outline of a post I wanted to write works very well, especially when you are less experienced.  When I had started my blog this is what I did for my first guest post on ProBlogger.  Darren Rowse was very nice and sent me a quick reply telling me my ideas were worth writing [note: his reply did not mean he would automatically post my written article, but rather that he liked the current direction].  Then I wrote up the post and sent it too him. He replied that he would love to post it soon.

I did the opposite for Daniel Scocco, Daily Blog Tips, the very same week.  I wrote the entire post because I knew the idea would really connect with him and emailed it.  He quickly sent a reply and told me he would be posting it soon.  The very next week I had a guest post go live at BOTH ProBlogger and Daily Blog Tips and my blog had been live for only a week!

Writing a Guest Post

In the last 6 months I have guest posted on dozens of blogs all around the internet.  Guest posting four times at Problogger, two times at Daily Blog Tips and then over 23 different blogs have rapidly increased my blogs links and traffic.  Currently I have three guest posts waiting to be published at three very high traffic blogs.  Each time I have submitted a guest post, it has been accepted so I have tried to think of how you can replicate this success.

The key is to write your very best content for others!  They will love it and so will their readers.  Then traffic and links will soar on your blog.  When I named this post, I thought of a significant event on this blog.  It was when we received 200 new subscribers in 2-3 days!  What happened is I was featured two time on Problogger in two days!  We got thousands of visitors and hundreds of new subscribers.  Many of you reading this might have come from one of those posts.

In addition to writing your best content, be sure to look at Alex’s recent post and reverse the role that Alex talks about in Preparing a Guest Post.  His post has you thinking as the blog owner, but put yourself in the guest posters shoes and think about how you could make the blog owner’s job easier.

One way I do this is by making the emails very brief when I send my guest posts.  I include:

1. My name and link to my blog
2. Proposed Title (usually 2 options)
3. Main Text
4. Image (w/ attribution)
5. Byline

I promise you, if you spend 2 hours writing a powerful guest post for your blog, you will have more traffic and subscribers then by spending 2 hours doing anything else online!  So stop what you are doing and get your guest post written and sent in today!

Related posts:

1. Tips for making a mark in the community with guest posts

2. How to Properly Prepare a Guest Post in 5 Simple Steps

3. Creating more appealing posts in 4 simple steps

Okay, the world isn’t destroyed but if you haven’t realized – our subscriber count shows a big fat ugly zero! Everything is back to normal now thankfully.

When I saw it for the first time, I was seriously contemplating the fact that I might have written something so awful that it scared away ALL our subscribers – but luckily when common sense settled in, I figured out that was just a stupid thought.

Anyways, after ‘some’ thinking, the question that snowballed into a rage was ‘Why FeedBurner, Why?!’

It varies from showing “zero” to “N/A” at different times, even though they are pretty much the same thing. Well technically they aren’t the same thing, in fact I would actually appreciate it if they showed N/A. Then at least our new visitors can see something’s wrong.

Our blog wasn’t the only tell-tale sign of FeedBurner going awry. Alex confirmed that logging into the FeedBurner Admin Panel – even that showed null stats! At least we eliminated the fact that we done something to the coding accidentally or something like that.

I looked up on the issue and there has been similar problems dating all the way back to mid-2005! Nearly four years later, they are still facing the same problem. Time and time again, Google reps have just said “We tried something new, it didn’t work out and hopefully your stats will return after we fix this.”

I suppose that would be a generic reply, but still a reply none the less.

I shouldn’t be so harsh on the Big G. I mean they offer a lot of services for free and a lot of opportunity for many individuals across the globe. Still, they are pretty inconsistent when it comes to FeedBurner.

Hopefully they can fix it but till then none of our readers will get any RSS updates nor email updates – we are extremely sorry for the inconvenience.

Thanking You

Blogussion Duo

Related posts:

1. Official GOOGLE SEO Guide Released!