What is your hooking plan?

How do you turn Mr New Visitor in one of your abitual visitors?

Being conscious of what your Hooking Strategy is can help you to give your blog a coherent feel and increase its impact and effectiveness.

Some Samples of Hooking Strategies:

1. I Give You Hot News

If you have a blog that covers news from your niche, you can hook your visitors because you offer news they can’t read somewere else, or focused news you gather from different sources, and they can find them all in the same place.

Being conscious of this allows you to tweak your blog to highlight this aspects, i.e. you can change your tagline to

Your One-Stop Source For <niche> News

or you can state this in your about page, in the sidebar, at the bottom of each post or where you think it may be effective, so that yor visitors will know why they should become abitual visitors.

2. I Give You a Hot Community

If you have a community-oriented blog, you should focus on that to hook your visitors, e.g. by encouraging comments, user messaging, discussions and by having a community-target blog design (e.g. having a vote system, big comment count, bonus for top commentators, user profile pages…)

3. I Give You Fresh Content

If you write a lot, you may hook your visitors stating that they’ll have fresh content to read every day, e.g. by having a daily column, or a daily “hot pick”

4. I Give You Knowledge

If you want to teach something to your reader,you should to tell them what they’re going to learn and how, and you should repeat this often (“Today I’m going to teach you how to do this and that“).

Obviously there are dozen of other hooking strategies, and you’ll probably want to blend more than one toghether, bu I think you should have a clear hooking plan to focus on.

Here at www.mapelli.info, things are like this:

  • I offer mainly blogging-related content, it’s a hot topic, but there are a lot of other sites in this niche
  • I don’t pretend to be a professional blogger, I’m just a guy interested in the blogosphere who has something to share
  • I offer full feeds
  • I’d like to have a bigger community here
  • My post rate is low

So my hooking strategies goes like this:

  • I try to be honest with my readers (no “How to make 10.000$ a month from your blog” posts)
  • I try to write original content, not to repeat things that can be easily found on other blogs
  • I try to help visitors as much as I can (e.g. the latest release of my Category Cloud plugin included all the features requested by my visitors)
  • I try to promote my full feed everywhere (I think my readers deserve to read my blog without having to visit my website)
  • I try to encourage conversation (since there are a lots of great contributors out there)

That’s nothing special, and can be refined, but it helps me to remain focused and coherent in what I give to my readers.

So, what is your hooking strategy? How do you increase your readers base? What you’re focused on? How do you transmit the benefits of being one of your loyal readers?