So you have gained a bit search engine traffic and links from social networks, things are chugging along nicely, but how do you make this new found traffic keep returning to your blog?

Well the reality is you need to have a useful blog, people need reasons to return. There are many reasons why a visitor may return to your blog; maybe to read topical articles which are updated regularly or to chat on a busy message board or maybe you provide useful tools which your users find handy.

Well writing an article is easy if you have knowledge of the websites topic. With some time and effort creating a community can be easy too; if you know your topic and can chat about it of course. But for those not savvy in web development or coding creating useful tools can be difficult and (more importantly) expensive. Don’t despair, there are many free tools, widgets and plug ins which can be added to popular content management systems or even just into your blogs HTML.

Finance and Currency Tools.

If your site publishes news or business information you may think about adding some useful financial tools to your site. For instance Yahoo provide a stock prices and news badge which can be used for free and customised with quotes to suit your users interests. If you are using Joomla as a CMS to power your blog you can grab a currency converter for Joomla from exchangerates.uk.com along with other currency tools. These types of tools add some extra stick to your blog and can look good if they are placed correctly into your design. There are many others out there if you Google for them.

News and content sharing tools.

Add some news headlines from similar niche blogs on your pages. Many sites these days give away RSS feeds for others to use; make use of them! Not only does it give your users more to look at, linking out to a few similar sites will do your SEO no harm (in small amounts!). If you use WordPress or Joomla check out their extension directories, there are tons of content sharing widgets and scripts. You can share video content, podcasts or pretty much anything.

These are just a few ideas for ways to help make your blog sticky. Naturally creating a totally unique useful tool will bring in more repeat visits especially if there are no others like it online. In the meantime maybe experiment with what is already freely available; you may just find the missing ingredient your blog needed.

Dave Wallace works for WebConcept3000.com who are specialists in corporate web design for London and the UK. Dave also writes his own blog here on topics such as SEO, development and design ideas as well as posting occasional guest blog posts.