Someone new arrives on your blog for the first time. He or she likes the initial blog post read, whether the referral came organically from another site, via a Twitter mention, or through a search engine result. Whatever the case, he or she likes what you have to offer, but how do you make the most of this positive experience and earn a long-time loyal reader?

Yes, you should absolutely promote your RSS feed and other ways to stay in touch, but the Top Posts WordPress Plugin could prove to be quite useful too. This simple sidebar widget will automatically display the most popular blog posts on your site, not based on the traffic that each post gets, but rather based on the number of comments they receive.

This is a critical distinction, since blog posts with lots of comments usually mean that the online community is actively engaging with that content and having an active discussion about it. These are the articles that you want to promote, because the hope is that the new reader will join in on the conversation too. You can set the Top Posts plugin to show the top posts based on a monthly, weekly, or all-time perspective.

Basic screenshots and the free download link can be found at TentBlogger.com, a site that talks about “blogging for fun and profit.”