Do you know how much of your traffic is returning traffic? If you don’t, you should! This can be an important metric when trying to increase your conversion rate. There are blogs that get thousands of hits a day but have 5 subscribers because they fall victim to some of these common mistakes:

1. Welcome Your Readers
Welcoming your readers can be the difference to them subscribing, or possibly leaving. Greeting your readers can make your blog more attractive and give your readers a sense of value. This by all means should be a simple one or two sentence greeting. After all, they are looking for the content. You could also take this a step further and track your incoming referral headers to display custom messages for sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and others.

2. Stay On Topic
If your blog is supposed to be about cars and you are posting information on baking cookies, you have an obvious problem. You would think this goes without saying but many people tend to mix to much of their personal life in with their niche blog. Once and a while it’s all good, but when you post about yourself all day instead of your topic people will get annoyed. Narrowing down the content you give will draw targeted traffic that is much more likely to become social on your blog.

3. Your Content Should Be Valuable
The easiest way to do this is to create content that helps others. Before you publish, look for tips and information you can improve on. Add inside information, or information from your experiences that cannot be found on any other blog. You cannot expect to get back if you don’t give anything at all. Helping your readers will also build trust, which can be very important when you start to grow.

4. Connect With Your Audience
Taking a few minuets to reply to comments and e-mails can be much more beneficial than you think. This doesn’t mean you have to stock your readers and reply to every single comment but letting your readers know you are listening is important. It builds a stronger community and people are much more apt to continue reading. Also, show people where to find you on services like Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and others.

5. Hold er’ Steady
Most important is to post regularly. Set your own goals, even if it’s just two posts a week you want people to know they can expect two posts every week. Humans love regularity by nature and when somethings out of whack people may respond adversely. Let them know that regardless of whats going on, they can count on seeing two posts a week on your blog. Some people find id hard to believe that people really follow blogs like this but it’s true. After some time on the web you will also find some blogs that you come to read regularly.

Don’t be afraid to comment with any ideas you have on converting visitors to subscribers. Although traffic is good, regular readers are even better.