Your blog can be an excellent tool for marketing your business online, but your blog will only be an effective tool if it is engaging your site visitors. That means your blog will be worthless if it is not being read or if site visitors are not interacting with it in a positive way.
In this article, I am going to identify goals you should set for your blog and then provide some ideas on how to accomplish these goals.
Setting Goals for an Engaging blog
It is important to set expectations on how you want your site visitors to interact with your blog.
Goal # 1 – You want to receive frequent and relevant comments on your blog posts
- Are you receiving comments on your blog posts?
- Are you staying up to date on approving comments?
- Do you respond to comments posted to your blog?
If visitors are commenting on your blog it means that they are finding your blog posts interesting and worthy of a dialogue. It is important to approve comments and to respond to questions in a timely manner.
Goal #2 – You want people to link to and share your content
Ideally, you want your visitors to share your content on Facebook. Twitter, Pinterest and other social media networks.
Goal #3 – You want visitors to subscribe to your feed or revisit your blog regularly
When you are providing valuable and frequent content your site visitors will want to subscribe to your RSS Feed or will revisit your blog.
Goal #4 – You want to build ongoing relationships with potential clients/customers.
The ultimate goal for your blog is to build a relationship with the website visitor. If you have done a good job using your blog to position your business as an expert in the field, your visitors will transition from a visitor into prospect. This will happen as the visitor signs up for your mailing list or contacts you for more information on your products or services.
Achieving Your Goal for a More Engaging Blog
Here are 10 tips for increasing visitor interaction on your blog:
- Make it easy to comment – Don’t be afraid to ask your visitors to leave comments and make it easy for them to do so. Don’t make your site visitors jump through hoops or turn over their first born before they can leave a comment. Use a good spam filter like Akismet to help combat your spam and make it easy for visitors to leave a comment.
- Make it easy to share – Make it super easy for your visitors to share your blog content. Add share buttons for the popular social media networks, so your visitors just have to click a button.
- Ask questions- Give your visitors a reason to respond by asking questions.
- Use polls – Add a poll to your blog post so you can collect your visitors opinions on a particular topic.
- Use giveaways or contests – Encourage visitors to share your content with a giveaway. Ask your visitor to comment or share to enter to win. For example: Use Twitter Hashtag #mybathtimefavorite to let us know, in 140 characters or less, which of our bubble bath scents is your favorite and be entered to win a $50 prize pack!
- Be funny – Humor is a great way to engage visitors. People who laugh and enjoy your content will want to return to read more. Share clever comics or memes that relate to your business.
- Tell stories – Make your blog posts relatable by sharing stories that your visitors can identify with.
- Use a catchy headline – Make sure your blog gets read by using a catchy or clever headline to attract attentions.
- Be on topic and current – Visitors don’t want to read about something 3 years after it was relevant. Make sure your content is of interest.
- Make the blog post easy to read – Make sure your blog post is easy to read by using short paragraphs and bulleted lists. Include quality pictures and graphics to break up long sections of text.
Do you have other ideas on how to make your blog more engaging? Share them with me!
