Create a loyal following and keep them!

I mentioned in an earlier post about how a “following” can greatly benefit you in your online activities. A following is defined as an act of “pursuit”. On the internet however, a following is a group of people who are subscribed to you, via means of RSS, newsletters etc.

The hard part isn’t in acquiring a group of followers but in keeping them. Anybody can create a website and write a few decent pages of content and post it all of the internet. This in turn may get you a “temporary” following of a few people, but you will find they will be unsubscribed shortly there after.

The key is in maintaining that list of people and getting them to appreciate day after day, week after week. The central aspect that you must understand in order to achieve this is that people like UPDATES, whether it be some news or a few new posts, this is a must in order to keep your group of followers.

Update your content daily! (yes, daily)

Search engines and humans alike benefit from receiving new content. The one thing I despise is when I subscribe to a blog and don’t see anything new for weeks at a time. What’s the point? Not only will you see a jump in traffic but a jump in subscribers as well. I have to admit that with my current relocation to London and the management of several of my other side projects, it’s becoming harder to continue publishing quality content on a daily basis.

Create a newsletter and send out weekly updates updates

This is quite important if you are managing a forum/messageboard or social network account. With forums you should try to send out newsletter once or twice a week, anymore than that and people start to see them as spam. With my latest forum (http://wheelsandwood.com) I manage to send out weekly statistics emails to all my members. This makes them feel part of the “community” and lets them know that the site is progressing and moving forwards.

Create a “community” feel

I can’t stress this enough, people like familiarity or in this case a “community” that is why you should aim to always include your members/subscribers into your site. Make sure that no one feels left out or alienated from everybody else, this is a sure fire way to lose a loyal follower. If you are a managing a blog or forum, hosting contests and providing little incentives will help you succeed in creating a “community feel”.

Provide incentives

This is pretty self explanatory, so I’m just going to touch on it. It is always good to provide your followers with some sort of incentive that will make them WANT to stay a subscriber. You can offer them a featured interview or get their site on the front page of yours. Little things like this go a long way in keeping your followers content.

To wrap up, if you are seeing your visitors hitting the back button after 10 seconds or if your RSS readers are depreciating faster than current interest rates I highly recommend you take some of these things into consideration.

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