10 Ways to Thank Your Blog Readers

An interesting question on Twitter the other day got me thinking about how to thank your blog readers for visiting and for loyalty. I wonder how many of us are truly doing this well.

Sometimes a single tweet can inspire a blog post. That’s how this post — my regular Monday morning blogging post — came to be.

The tweet came from Lisa, a webmaster and blogger in Rhode Island who writes the blog,&nbsp Inspire to Thrive:

@angeld0ve @JustBrenLee @timbo1973 @NotNowMomsBusy How do you thank your blog readers?

— Lisa Sicard ????? (@Lisapatb) March 23, 2014

I think it’s important to respect your audience. I put a great deal of effort into my posts, and I hope that for the most part, that shows. I never set out to “crash something together” just to make a deadline, though there are posts that seem to come together more quickly than others.

The most obvious way to thank your readers is to just come right out and say, “Thank you!” And I do thank you for reading this post and any others. It’s a very rewarding feeling for a blogger to know that someone out there might actually be interested in what he has to say. I appreciate your time.

Beyond those, there are several ways to thank your blog readers and some blogs are more active in these various options than others:

1. Thank them in comments.

Thank your readers for reading and for commenting on your content. As we all know, it takes effort to actually write out a response to a blog post. That effort ought to be acknowledged. Sometimes a comment may say it all. In those cases, I try to make use of Livefyre’s “Like” button, so that I at least acknowledge the comment. It also shows that I read it, and I do read every comment.

I’m getting better at this, but I’m not perfect, so if you have left me a comment that I didn’t respond to (yet), please don’t be offended. I am working on it!

2. Comment on their blog.

Essentially, this takes giving thanks for a reader’s comment one step further: you go to their blog and leave a comment of your own on a post they’ve written. It’s a kind of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” deal.

My longtime readers know this is a weakness of mine. Or to put it a little more honestly, I suck at this. I am working on it, too, but I’m thinking it may be time for a new “comment day” challenge. More on that to come.

3. Thank them for their social media shares.

Your blog readers on social media can be a big part of your blog’s marketing efforts by sharing your content to their audience. Unless you all follow exactly the same people all the time, which is probably unlikely, when people share your content, it can expand your reach, which can get more eyes on your site.

Twitter (and many third-party platforms) need to make this easier. The “new style” retweet will show up in your notifications tab on Twitter, but when you click reply, you’re sending a tweet to yourself, not the person who retweeted you. I try not to miss “old-style” retweets, but even those get missed once in a while during events like Sunday night’s #blogchat, which moves so quickly that it’s barely possible to keep up with the conversation itself.

4. Share their content on social media.

Just like returning the favor for commenting, sharing a link to your readers’ posts on Facebook and Twitter can also serve as a thank you.

I joined Triberr and am trying to build it because I think it’s a great way to do this and build bigger social circles of people likely to visit each others’ blogs.

5. Mentions

This post is a perfect example. I mentioned Lisa because of her tweet and linked to her blog. I hope you, as my reader, will visit her blog and check it out, since, if you’ve read this far, you already know she’s capable of inspiring a discussion you’re interested in.

6. Giveaways

Some bloggers conduct regular giveaways on their blog, awarding freebies like gift cards or products or even offering free eBooks they’ve written. It’s a great way to get people to engage, but it has the danger of creating only short-term engagement: some might comment only during a giveaway but not the rest of the time. Some engagement might be better than none, of course, but if the engagement stops as soon as the giveaway is over, you must ask yourself how valuable the giveaway really was in the grand scheme of things.

7. Guest Posting

Offering your loyal readers the opportunity to guest-post on your blog or offering them a post they can run on theirs is another way to build better relationships.

The caution here is that the topics should be consistent, and not everyone who reads your blog writes in your same niche, so for this to really work well, there probably should be at least some commonality in terms of what the two blogs cover.

It’s also important that guest posts be weighed against the amount of time a blogger has to actually write them. Not all of us have time to write content for someone else: some of us have a full plate just trying to keep up with our own posting schedule!

8. Quizzes and Blogfests

A quiz can allow readers to play along easily and might inspire them to write a future post on their blog. Blogfests also help your readers generate content by providing a topic and allowing your readers to sign up at your blog so that you can link to that post a their blog.

Participants may benefit by having more people stop by their blog to read what they had to say. But they also can do the same, find new blogs to read and connect with, and more potential regular readers of their own.

This is the primary reason I created the Saturday Six in the early days of this blog.

9. Go “Off the Blog” with an Email

Sometimes, an email can be the right choice, particularly when you want to thank a reader for engaging in a conversation in a diplomatic way on a potentially divisive or sensitive topic.

10. Profile Your Readers

Some blogs will write a post — weekly, monthly, quarterly — spotlighting a loyal reader. It’s a nice gesture to make the readers feel appreciated and help promote their blogs. They’re more likely to mention you on their blog, and help their readers find you.

Have you tried any of these?

Which of these have worked for you? Which ones didn’t work as well? And how do you thank your readers?