How-to turn visitors into returning visitors

June 7th, 2007 § 45

Helping people especially first time visitors feel at ease is an important aspect both to contain traffic thus turning visitors into subscribers for establishing a readership. Your blog’s design and navigational structure count but here I’ll tell you some additional goodies you could add to make visitors stick to your blog after a first time visit or revisit.

help them subscribe to your blog

Not everybody understands the meaning behind those orange RSS icons, how about telling them how to stick to your blog when they first landed on a post and thought coming back but didn’t know how to stay in touch?

What Would Seth Godin Do is a nice Wordpress plugins allowing you to place your own welcome message for your visitors and telling them how to stay in touch.

what would seth godin do wordpress plugin

After uploading and activating the plugin, go to Options > WWSGD and write that welcome text message and don’t forget to place your RSS and email subscription links too, telling visitors what they are for. You can also customise where the message should appear either at the beginning of a post or at the end. Under the Repetition text box, put the number of times you want the message to appear for that same person. That is if you put 3, the message will disappear only after the 3rd consecutive visit.

Thank them for taking the time to read you

A polite email thanking a visitor for reading you might well say a lot of how much you care about him. Kind of making him a special visitor. But no need to tire yourself writing countless emails for every visitor.

The Comment Relish plugin will send a first time commentator an email. Now the fun part is that you can customise that email sent like telling the visitor how much you liked seeing him around and not forgetting too, putting concise information in how to stick around through subscription.

Upload and activate the Comment Relish plugin. A new tab will appear among the plugins section named Comment Relish. Make sure under the drop-down menu of Enable Comment Relish, you select True. Then fill the other fields which are somewhat intuitive.

So when first time commentator puts a comment, he will be receiving shortly after your thank you email.

welcome them back

Show visitors how much you care for every of their visits and revisits. The Welcome back plugin allows you to put a nice welcome back message that will greet visitors on their second and further visits displaying their myBlogLog avatar and a message welcoming them back and politely asking them if they liked reading your blog, so why not subscribe to it?

welcome visitors back plugins

Download the Welcome back plugin, upload and activate it. Then using your favourite FTP program, open your sidebar.php and paste that line of code where you want the welcome back message to appear : 


<?php cur_welcome(); ?>

I would suggest you putting it above your subscriptions/RSS icons and in the highest region of your sidebar. See my leftmost sidebar for an idea.

If you want some further welcome back coding, here are some from Zeo to dress up your blog :

Put this code above your comment box, to welcome back a user who has already commentated: I would suggest pasting it instead of the Leave a Reply text which is usually wrapped around a <h3 id="respond"> tag in your comments.php file. 


<h3 id="respond">
<?php if ( ($comment_author != "") && (!$user_ID) ) { ?>
	Welcome back, want to share something <?php echo $comment_author; ?>?
<?php } else { ?>
	Share Your Comments
<?php } ?>
</h3>

welcome back comment's authors

Put this code anywhere you want to welcome back visitors with a nice message after a certain amount of visits. Write your message instead of the welcome back text, inside the quotes found on the 3rd line of code.


<?php if ( isset($_COOKIE['comment_author_'.COOKIEHASH]) ) {
        $comment_author = $_COOKIE['comment_author_'.COOKIEHASH];
        echo 'Welcome back, '.$comment_author.'!';
} ?>

turning visitors into returning visitors

Send some link love their way

Here’s a nice way to win over a revisit from a Wordpress bloggers who commented on your blog using the Show Top Commentators and No-follow plugins features.

Download and activate both of these plugins. Then whenever someone comments and appears on the Top Commentators list of your blog, they will get a link in their Wordpress dashboard as incoming links. Sure they would be eager to click to your own blog.

That’s it, some tricks you can use to win over first time visitors to make them loyal readers. If you have got any doubt or need help on any part, please do tell me either through the comments or by contacting me and I’ll be glad to help you out.

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