Loyal Readers vs Strangers

I was talking to a new blogger and asked him, which of the two: loyal reader and stranger; is important for him.

The Loyal readers are those who subscribed your feed or those who frequently visit your blog. While “Strangers” are those visitors who came from the search engine result pages or from any other sources and they don’t have plan on visiting your blog again.

For this new blogger, the important visitors of his blog are those strangers because according to him, these kind of visitors are the ones who would likely click on the ads displayed on his blog.

His thought is actually similar to the comment posted by Rich at my article,
“Making first time visitors to revisit your blog“:

This is an Interesting post. However, one must not forget that

first time

visitors who do not return to our blogs are also fine if the blogger is making money from Google Adsense. This is because these

first time

visitors came more or less from search engines and are looking for something to buy, and therefore will click the ads.

Returning

visitors are more important if you are into affiliate marketing, selling ad space, or building an email list. Otherwise, you can hardly make money from them immediately. Readers love to read, leave comments, and follow the blog. But they don’t want to buy or click ads. Most of them may even leave you if they learned that you are selling them a product.

But my way of thinking is a little bit different, although I believe that the idea of Rich contained on that comment is true. For me, loyal readers and strangers are both important and equally important. But, it would be better if you target first the loyal readers.

Why?

Targeting Loyal Readers

To let you know, everytime new bloggers asked me advices on how to blog, I always told them these things:

1. Blog on the topic you are passionate of. You can write more articles (quality contents) related to your blog’s niche if you have passion on that topic.
   
2. Don’t just blog because you want to earn money from it. Blog because you want to share your knowledge and expertise to others. In doing so, you’ll never lose your interest in blogging.

And these things will lead you to aim on gaining more loyal readers.

I am not saying that you should not target visitors coming from the search engines. Actually you should target them too because just like what Rich had said, visitors coming from the search engines result pages (SERP) are those who would likely click the ads, thus giving you the chance to earn more from the ads.

What I am actually trying to point out is that target first the loyal readers. I already told you how to target loyal readers in my article, “how to make your first time visitors return to your blog“. Actually, there is only one way, that is to write more interesting and useful (helpful) articles.

Now, why should you aim first to gain more loyal readers for your blog?

Well, it’s because these loyal readers will tell you what to write for your blog. Based on my experience here on this blog, “SELaplana“, loyal readers tend to react on what you are telling them on your articles by replying the copy of the article they received at their email or feed readers, or by dropping their comments at the comment section of the live version of your article.

From their emails or comments, you can picked ideas on what to write for your next article. So, you’ll never lose ideas on what to write.

And then, for sure, search engines will spider the articles you published at your blog. By the power of the SEO you applied into your articles (or blog in general), some of your articles will be listed at the top position of the search engine result. This also means that your blog will gain more visitors coming from the search engines. These visitors might not be loyal to you but at least most of them will give you the chance to earn lots of money from the ads displayed on your blog.

But that’s not the only things you’ll get from loyal readers.

More Advantages of Loyal Readers

1) Earn Money through your loyal readers

Just like what Rich had said on his comment, you can make money through your loyal readers by selling them products, and services.

But did you know that you can also earn money from the ads through your loyal readers?

It might be true that most of them are ad blind, but it is also true that some of them are not and are actually visiting the advertised products or websites that interest them.

To let you know, this blog is also earning from the Adsense embedded on the feeds of it (Adsense for Feeds).

2) Loyal Readers Keep Your Blog Alive

I frequently tell my readers that traffic is the life of their blog. Without traffic their blog is dead.

So, while you are still optimizing your blog for the search engine and there is no visitors yet coming from the search engines, your loyal readers will keep your blog alive.

3) Loyal Readers will make you popular

I don’t know if you’ll agree that: The visitors that I considered as strangers will just make you rich through the ads displayed on your blog. But your blog’s loyal readers will make you popular.

How?

Well, for sure, some of your loyal readers are bloggers also. There will be times that they will talk about you at their own blogs. Then they will establish link from their blogs to your blog or to the particular article of your blog.

And didn’t I tell your that popular bloggers are the ones who became more popular?

Finale

That’s the reason why I am  always aiming to gain more loyal readers of this blog. If you want to become of my loyal readers, then you can either subscribe the feed of this blog or by simply revisiting this blog to check for updates.

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