Many bloggers fail when it comes to building a better blog. Making your blog stand out of the crowd requires a strategy, just like a business. Even if you’re not part of an affiliate program of selling your own products through your blog, think of it this way: You’re selling yourself, your knowledge, your writings.

And if you’re selling those, in the end, what are your readers if not your clients? That’s why a reader-centric strategy is a must for everyone looking to grow his blog into a successful one.

Customer/Reader Relationship Management

In business terms, we’re talking about the Customer Relationship Management (CRM), a process that requires a good, two-way, level of communication between the business and its customers, in our case, the blogger and his readers. The role of CRM is to provide the business with more accurate information about the needs and wants of customers.

As a blogger, having a reader-oriented strategy can generate a bigger exposure and of course, blog loyalty. While applying SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques you can gain a lot of new readers for your blog, using CRM-like methods will help you in learning more about your current readers, and how to turn them into loyal ones, even promoters of your blog.

These readers are the ones that link back from they own blogs, comment heavily on yours, submit your articles to social bookmarking websites, and let’s face it, sometimes, relationship marketing and promotion by word-of-mouth does a way better job than paying hundreds of dollars for services like Google AdWords.

Reader-oriented Strategies

While businesses have to pay huge amounts of money for CRM specific software, us, bloggers have all we need at our fingertips: Our blog. And if we blog for money, our blog is our business.

Take your time to go through your comments, visit your readers’ blogs, analyze your statistics for keywords, popular articles, ask questions and find the best strategy to engage your readers in being an active part of your blog’s community.

Some of these strategies include competitions with prizes for the most active people, implementing readers’ suggestions or writing about what your readers specifically ask you to. Some bloggers use Twitter’s services to establish a quicker way to communicate with their readers, without having to post short articles that otherwise wouldn’t add much value to their blog. The great part is that the readers’ response to those short Twitter posts can generate great content and blog affinity.

A great example of reader-centric strategy has been recently implemented by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger with his “Speed Posting” series: 1 reader question, 3 minutes to answer. This strategy has generated a huge response in his community, a lot of new content and hundreds of comments spread over a few 3 minute-posts.

Final Thoughts

Your blog can only gain from a strong, smart, reader-oriented strategy and always remember that a good blogger should be a good manager of his business – his blog.

Over to you, what reader strategies have you successfully implemented on your blog, so far?

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