Building trust with your readers is essential if you want them to keep coming back to your blog and sharing it with their peers. Establishing this relationship requires the blogger to write on a human level – meaning that they have to appeal to their audience’s senses and emotions to strike a chord in their memory.

Here are some emotional factors bloggers need to consider when writing:

Directly engage and interact with readers. This often requires you to write in a friendlier, conversational tone in order to invite discussion on your blog. Asking open-ended questions and sharing your own opinions are excellent means of appearing sociable and approachable with your blog.

Be a good listener. When your readers respond to your work, either through email, comments or face-to-face, be sure to consider their recommendations or criticism openly. Respond to their comments and thank them for their participation to show that you value their feedback. If your readers ask something of you, be sure to deliver it, and if you can, suggest a direction they can take to find it on their own. This way, if you can’t always appear authoritative, you can at least be reliable and helpful.

Stick to what is important. Address your audience’s interests and concerns with vigour and honesty, without flying solo. While relaying your personal experiences is helpful, and recommended for many blogs, you want to do so in a manner that relates to your audience’s needs. You want your blog to stand for something, and to show conviction to a particular topic if you want others to rally behind it.

Provide value and culminate it over time. Offer your readers something – a community, a source of entertainment, instruction, a pool of resources – anything that serves to help them understand or use a particular subject. The best blog posts are the ones that are either incredibly useful or incredibly novel, they have to jump out and say ‘I’m here to do (blank) for you”. As the value of your posts becomes more explicit and accessible, the more popular they will become. Build this value overtime to establish your blog and retain visitor loyalty. Be consistent with your information and make it easy for users to scroll through archives and comments as they become more acquainted with your work.

These qualities may seem straight-forward on paper, but you’ll be surprised to see how many blogs and sites fail to establish a meaningful relationship with their audience simply because their authors write in a detached and distant fashion. Be involved with your readers and put yourself in their shoes. Treat them like you would want to be treated, it’s the golden rule! So keep these pointers in mind and build a blog that appeals to people’s need for care, community and peace of mind.