We have been discussing in our previous post, “The Secrets of Successful Blogging,” the great revolution that is going around the world in the internet with blog.  We are continuing here on that topic with the key to successful blogging and “deeds that can build trust in your blog.”

What’s the key to success? It’s building trust with your blog and there by increasing traffic especially of those loyal readers. So, how do you build trust with your readers? You must give people a reason to trust your writing. The easiest way to achieve that is to provide value. How do you provide value? Help your readers by providing information that they can put to use and use immediately. When every post you write provides your readers with value, the trust grows into rapport, a symbiosis where you elucidate you understand the reader and they in turn know you understand and care about them. It develops over time. Apart from writing value content, concentrating in these aspects can grow the number of loyal readers:

• First impression is the best impression. Build a blog that portrays a professional appearance. Choose a mind-boggling theme.
• Offer FeedBurner subscription. Put a RSS feed button at the top right hand corner of the blog. Put a RSS subscription button on every single page.
• Offer at least twenty, latest, full posts in your RSS (recently, I decreased this number to three on this blog to curtail the contents that got scraped from this blog through feed). No partial feeds if you want to increase your RSS count. Full text RSS gets more loyal readers and thereby more traffic, experts say.
• The point of a FeedBurner chiclet is to show your readers the blog’s growth and development over time. Furthermore, new readers can see the amount of already subscribed readers to get an idea of the age or popularity of the blog which often dictates how long they stay around. Showing a FeedBurner chiclet with no subscribers or a few subscribers can be detrimental. The mob mentality or flock psychology comes into action here. It turns people away in many cases. Hence do not put a chiclet with your RSS reader count unless the count is in a few thousands.
• Put an email subscription option in a very much visible place. Assure that there is not going to be any spam mail except the post contents and that the email address will not be shared with anybody. As well, assure the potential subscribers that they can opt out of the subscription at any point in time if they are not satisfied with the contents by just clicking on the unsubscribe option that resides at the bottom of each mail. Be transparent.
• The load time of your pages is extremely important. It is estimated that if a page doesn’t load within five to eight seconds, you lose one-third of your visitors. If your blog’s loading speed is slower than that, you need a redesign or move to a faster server. Hence check your blog’s loading time at Website speed checker of Self SEO and compare the loading time of your blog with that of several other famous blogs to know where you stand. Too much of plugins and widgets can hinder loading time. Hence restrict plugins and widgets to the minimal required. Slow loading pages are one of the major annoyances for me while on a blog. Check out nine other peeves that do annoy me as well as a reader while on a blog in the earlier post “Top ten ways to annoy your website visitors” and try avoiding all those peeves.
• Good grammar and spelling matter. Proofread at least twice before posting. Errors give the impression of sloppiness and carelessness. Use language that is appropriate to the audience. It will build empathy.
• Prefer quality over quantity. No matter how good your material is, too much of it can cause feed-overwhelm and unsubscribes. If you write too often, pushing down the previous post and its visibility, you decrease the reach of each post, run the risk of increasing unsubscribes, and create more work for yourself. My preference is two and don’t feel compelled to keep up with the frequency.
• Don’t make outrageous and unbelievable claims, like “Read this blog and you’ll be a millionaire by the end of the week.” People are used to scams, get-rich-quick schemes and rip-offs and it will do no good for a new blogger whereas John Chow runs a similar blog where he claims teaching “making money online” but brags where he dined, rambled, flirted etc., and I couldn’t find his traffic trending down even when Google put him in doghouse, just because his loyal RSS readers are helping reach those numbers. Since people read all his humbugs and snobberies, he earns more than $20,000 pm and they’re following him like rats that followed Pied Piper.
• Paid to post is corrupting the web and will experience a user backlash. Be explicit when you are being paid to endorse a product or service. An advertorial is fine as long as it is transparent but I don’t read posts done for a payment and I would rather vouch “Don’t offer paid blog reviews. It makes you look like a prostituting beggar who is unable to monetize his blog with something legitimate.”
• Make your “About” page personal and comprehensive. Clearly identify who is behind the site. Nothing creates more suspicion than a blog that tries to hide the identity of its publisher. Put photo of yours on the “About” page. It plays an important part in making visitors feel comfortable that a real blogger is behind the site.
• Make it easy for the visitors to contact you with a “Contact” page.
• Allow people to comment on articles. Interactivity and an exchange of views build community and a sense of involvement.
• If people provide constructive criticism or comments, don’t delete them, but respond with your point of view.
• Register meaningful comments on other blogs that do provide “signature line” for comments. Signature line provides link to the commentator’s blog so that you attract a reader of that blog to your blog by your comments.
• Comment like an outsider on your blog itself. Comment using great bloggers’ names. To achieve a goal, some little evil deeds like this can be handy without hurting anybody.

Going by the theory of splitting extra long posts to avoid monotony for readers, we are ending this post here to continue in the next post Tame Crawlers To Obey Your Directives.