Launching a blog is easy: it’s building traffic to the site and encouraging people to return that causes the problems. That’s why it’s so rare for blogs to become successful overnight. It takes time to build up there relationships with your readers that will make the site successful.
The good news is that if you can build engagement with your visitors, you can start to dramatically improve your site’s overall performance while creating a dedicated following that will stand by your site for the months and years to come.
Don’t believe us? The statistics don’t lie. 43% of people admit to skimming blog posts and 36% prefer list-based headlines, while the number of bloggers is expected to reach 31.7 million in 2020. These statistics combined are a timely reminder that there’s plenty of competition in the blogosphere and that if you want to stand out in the crowd, you need to make engagement a priority.
And so with that in mind, let’s take a look at just a few of the things you can do to increase engagement on your blog site.
1. Launch a poll
Polls are great because they’re quick and easy to run and don’t require a huge amount of input from people – they can simply click a button while reading your blog post and then keep on reading.
The good thing about running polls is that you can also use them to gather data and even to allow readers to have their say on whatever the hot topic of the day is. In other words, as well as boosting engagement, it can also help you to crowdsource content.
2. Embed videos
Embedding videos into your blog posts can help to break up the written elements on the page and even to increase dwell time. If you’re selling products through your blog – or even if you’re monetising it with affiliate links – embedding videos can also help to increase conversions and revenue.
3. Collaborate
Collaborating with other bloggers helps to get your name out there and to introduce you to new audiences. It can also increase engagement both with new readers and existing ones by presenting them with a familiar face.
This essentially allows you to piggyback on the engagement that other creators receive from their audiences and to use it to boost your own community.
4. Address them directly
If you go out of your way to speak to your audience directly, it can help to grab them by the lapels and to strengthen the bond between blogger and reader. This might not work if you do it all the time, but it’s super effective if you don’t do it too often.
Save it for when you need their help to vote for you in awards ceremonies or to support some new initiative that you’re launching.
5. Ask questions
Kevin Holts of australian writings also blogs about creative writing on his own website, where he says that the best way to boost engagement is to ask questions at the end of your articles. This acts as a call-to-action, pushing people to leave a comment instead of simply browsing away. Encouraging people to leave comments can help to start a debate and to keep the conversation going.
6. Show some personality
In the vast majority of cases, it’s a blogger’s personality that helps to make them so popular. That’s because bloggers trade on opinions, and everyone has an opinion.
It’s the personalities that make us trust those opinions, which is why people prefer to consume content by bloggers that they have some level of engagement or interaction with. Showing some personality will increase engagement but it’ll also help to boost trust and to brand you as an authority.
7. Respond to comments
If people are taking the time to comment on your articles, the least you can do is put in the effort to respond to them. Responding to comments can encourage people to revisit your site and will also send out a powerful message that tells people that you care about what they have to say. If people see you responding to comments, they’re more likely to leave one of their own.
8. Give them a reason to come back
If you want people to engage with you, you need to give them a reason to come back to your site again and again.
In some cases, you can do this purely through the provision of regular fresh content. In
others, you’ll want to run competitions, publish guest posts and do whatever else you can to give them a reason to return. And make sure that you’re using social media outlets and mailing lists to bring people back, too.
Conclusion
Audience engagement is often the best metric to look at when determining how successful a blog is.That’s beca use for your readers to engage with you, you have to be creating the content that they want to consume.
You need to create a community around your blog and put in the time and the work to build relationships and engagement not as a short term fix but as a long-term strategy. When you get it right, you’ll be able to tell just by looking at your analytics.
Good luck.