Your Audience Are Your Readers, Not Google’s Algorithm.

Ask yourself whether you are putting more effort into writing something wonderful for your readers or using every search engine optimization (SEO) trick you know to bring traffic to your website or blog?  You do know your audience are your readers, not Google’s algorithm, right?

Don't misunderstand, I am not against using SEO to get more traffic to your website or blog.  The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work and tricking people into visiting your website or blog is at best a temporary fix if you don't provide quality content worth coming back for.

The truth is that it takes a lot of work to write something wonderful and telling other people about it over and over again.  If you're not getting high numbers of return visitors than maybe you're not putting enough effort into your writing.  I know that sounds harsh, it sounded harsh when I first heard it myself, but you know you don't bookmark a site that has lousy content so you can go back later, do you?

The only way you're going to keep people coming back is to write something wonderful.  Make it authentic, make it real and do it again.  Wash, rinse and repeat!

Don't be afraid to be controversial, but avoid confrontational at all costs.  In other words, "Make people think."  If your comments remain conversational you're doing something right, but on the other hand, if the comments have a hostile tone you probably should take a trip back to your drawing board and start over.

Speaking of starting over, you may want to consider creating a new blog like I have done at Instant Blog Subscribers.  Not only do I have a lot more readers, but those readers are fully engaged in the never ending conversation blogs were meant to be.