31 Days to Building a Better Blog - Day 1. Email a New Reader of Your Blog

This is the central page of the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog Project that I’m running here at ProBlogger.
What is the 31 Day Project About?

To put it most simply - it’s a month long series of posts here at ProBlogger designed to walk you through 31 tasks that you can do to make your blog better. You can read more about how the project works and how to participate in my introduction to the project.

The project is made up of two parts:

My Tips and Reader Tips

Below you’ll find a summary of both. To keep up to date with the project subscribe to ProBlogger’s RSS feed or to our daily email updates.

To participate with a tip of your own simply follow the steps outlined in this post.
The Posts So Far

Your task for this first day of the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog Challenge is to email a new reader of your blog.

Create a great impression upon a brand new readers to your blog by choosing a commenter that is new and emailing them to thank them for their comment.

It might not sound like the most profound tip but I’ll let you in on a secret - this is one of the main strategies I used to build up ProBlogger’s audience a couple of years ago.

What I found is that when you do it the chances of the readers that you email coming back to your blog again increases significantly. Get them to come back to your blog once and you increase the chances of them coming back again… and again….

So email a reader now, thank them for commenting and tell them that you’re looking forward to further interactions.

Make sure you include a link back to your blog so they know who you are and make the email relevant to their comment (ie answer a question they asked or add to their comment in some way). While there are some tools out there that do this automatically for you - the more personal you can make it the better.

This simple tip takes just a moment to do but can create a loyal long time reader. Do it at least once a day (or set yourself a higher target) and you’ll build your blog consistently over time.
Is this Tip Not SPECTACULAR Enough For You?

Last time I shared this tip with a fellow blogger they rolled their eyes at me and told me that they didn’t want to find just one more reader for their blog - they wanted hundreds or thousands.

This blogger failed to realize two things:

1. Loyal Readers Spread the Word - I’ve found that in many cases a single reader quickly becomes numerous loyal readers because they like to spread the word. They do this through their own blogs, word of mouth and social networking sites etc.

2. Loyal Readers Build Page Views - One loyal reader can potentially view your blog hundreds (if not thousands) of times. A daily visit from that reader for a year brings an extra 365 page views to your blog. Gain an extra loyal reader every day for a full year and the numbers start to add up.

While there’s nothing wrong with attracting thousands of new readers to your blog quickly - the majority of times they’ll come and go very quickly. Build loyal readers one by one on a daily basis and can be a lot more fruitful in the long run.