Your readership are the people that frequently read your website. If you read a newspaper on a regular basis, you are a particle of that newspaper’s readership. In analytical terms, they are your ‘returning visitors’.
We can measure the size of our readership in a multitude of ways, such as by the amount of followers we have on Twitter, how many people like our Facebook page, and how many people are subscribed to our feed.
The size of our readership has a considerable amount to do with how much traffic our blogs receive. I’ll provide an example:
blog A gets 1000 hits from search engines, but has content of a low standard and so provides nothing of value to its visitors. They leave and do not come back.
blog B gets 1000 hits from search engines, and has a content of a high standard, and so provides informative content to its visitors. 60% of these 1000 visitors subscribe to blog B and read the blog on a regular basis. This conversion happens on a monthly basis, and blog B’s readership serve tens of thousands of visits as returning visitors.
In addition to the point demonstrated in that example, the larger the loyal readership you have, the more your article will be shared through social media, email and suchlike mediums. If you’re part of Nick’s Traffic Tricks’ readership, you’ll know the importance of social media (for instance, it can positively effect your search engine rankings).
The task of establishing a readership has connotations with being a particularly tricky task, but you’re on Nick’s Traffic Tricks — that won’t be a problem. Some webmasters stand by the viewpoint that if you build it, they will come (which would translate to write good content and you’ll build a readership) but even then you will have a hard time converting your visitors into loyal readership.
That’s where PunchTab comes in.
PunchTab
PunchTab, founded in January of 2011 by Ranjith Kumaran and Mehdi Ait Oufkir, is an online application that allows you to “build instant loyalty”.
PunchTab is available for utilization in two ways: as an evolving loyalty program that webmasters implement to incentivize their users to visit every day or as a single, exclusive promotional giveaway widget that encourages users to spread the word about your site in exchange for entries into a prize raffle.
The former is more relevant to this article than the latter, the former generates a long-term readership and traffic, whereas the latter generates an influx short-term traffic.
You reward your visitors for doing actions such as visiting your website once a day, commenting, sharing an article on Twitter or Facebook, and much more. The PunchTab platform allows you to reward visitors on your website for doing an immensely wide array of functions; even using the search box.
In PunchTab, there is a catalogue feature. You can build a catalogue of rewards and specify the amount of points needed to get a certain reward. These incentives will develop your readership and the activity on your website greatly, especially if your content is valuable and informative.
Drawbacks
There are several drawbacks that you will need to consider. The good thing with these drawbacks is that they can be limited by you, the webmaster.
Firstly, there are risks of your website getting artificial, non-targeted traffic. I meant this in the sense that the Average Joe, with no interest in your niche or your content, may use the reward scheme at no benefit to you. To almost kill the chances of this happening, choose a reward that only people interested in your niche would be appreciative of (an SEO blog may reward SENuke, for example). Also, giving rewards can be costly, depending on how expensive your rewards are and how easy it is for your readership to acquire the rewards.
If you are building artificial traffic, you should not continue using PunchTab. You can monitor whether or not you are building artificial traffic by looking at the progress of your bounce rate since your implemented the loyalty program.
Another minor setback is that your visitors can only connect to your loyalty program if they have a Facebook account. This isn’t too bad, unless your blog is targeted at grandmothers who like golf. Even then it probably wouldn’t be terribly bad.
