In nearly all niche blogging topics, there is competition to be the best and the biggest. Knowing that your visitors can go to any number of blogs and get similar information, how do you make your blog stand out from the rest? Tell me, what’s so unique about you?

Chances are, if you’re just developing your blog and your niche, you’re not sure what’s unique about your site or blog. But you need to know how to make yourself unique to stand out from the crowd and keep new visitors coming back for more.

While there are plenty of posts about retaining your visitors, here are some of my personal tips from what has worked well for me.

Content

Write Lists: Doing so makes it easier for your visitors to read your posts. Instead of huge blocks of text, break up your points into lists and elaborate.

Be Timeless: Let your visitors extract more information when they dig through your archives. Make sure that your posts are on point and are valuable long after they have been written.

Urgent and Exciting: Make your posts on target but make your visitors want to read your post right now. Not save for later. Few people “come back to read.” Make sure you’re encouraging your visitors to read your post right now and make the post exciting!

Create Focal Points: Images, polls, and statistic charts are all good for catching your visitor’s eyes. Use them as reference points throughout your posts to make your visitors interested in reading what your image or poll has to do with the post.

Edit and Proof Read: Cut down on your spelling and grammatical errors by reading and re-reading your posts. It becomes tedious and sometimes a little annoying to read the content you’ve written 100 times but do it. While you won’t always have the most perfect spelling, you can attempt to clean up your act.

Post Schedule: It doesn’t have to be daily or weekly, just pick how often you’re going to post and make it consistent.

RSS: Prominently display how to subscribe to your RSS feed and then remind your visitors when they’re done reading your post that they should pick up your feed.

Be Hot: Write about the latest trends, technology, gadgets, Web 2.0, and of course, Google. All these topics are interesting to a lot of people and bring in a slue of visitors.

Be Relevant: Your post titles shouldn’t tease but actually tell your visitors what the post is about. If your post titles aren’t interesting, the post will be ignored and your content will be looked at as boring.

Design

Simple Wins: Title your navigation points and ensure that what you do show on your sidebars are easily explainable by the header title.

Navigation: Make it easy to page hop on your site by placing your navigation in a place that is easily found and reached from any point of your site.

Look Good: Poor color combinations or colors that are too bright can hurt your visitor’s eye. Be eye catching without being painful to the eyes.

Optimize 404 Pages: Give your 404 pages a little edge to keep your visitors on your site rather than the boring “Sorry, you’re looking for something that is not here.” Include a way for visitors to go back to the home page, search your site, or browse categories when they have reached a 404 page.

Summary

Every niche has extra points that can be used in attracting and retaining visitors interested in that niche. But I believe what I’ve mentioned are basic keys regardless of which niche you blog in.

Have you tired a unique way to attract and retain your visitors? What’s worked for you and what hasn’t?

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