What do you do, to engage your readers?
You hear a lot about driving traffic to your blog. Making pretty permalinks, seo titles, keyword saturated posts, valuable content, knowing your market and of course a nice site design always helps. So you do your research, implement all the tips and tricks and you start to get traffic.
You think its great. People are reading your blog. They are actually interested in what you have to say!
Or are they? How do you know? Hopefully you have a decent statistical app installed, like clicky web analytics, sitemeter, google analytics, or my favorite, WordPress.com’s stats plugin.
You’re stats will tell you how many visitors, where they’re coming from, how they got here and most importantly what they’re reading and for how long they decide to stay on your site. But what you really want to do is….
You want to engage your readers!
You put in a lot of hard work getting them here, so keep them here, give them something to do, besides just read!
Make Your Blog Interactive on 12seconds.tv
Video/Audio
If you don’t have audio and video on your blog, you are missing a ton of opportunity. Watching video on the web will soon surpass television (my prediction). People love to watch and here what you have to say. Its entertaining and educational.
Check out the powerful plugin Vipers Video Quicktags, a one click solution to embed all your videos from youtube, vimeo, daily motion and many others.
Video Stats: provided by comScore.com
- 76.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
- The average online video viewer watched 356 minutes of video (approximately 6 hours), up 15 percent versus December.
- 100.9 million viewers watched 6.3 billion videos on YouTube.com (62.6 videos per viewer).
- 54.1 million viewers watched 473 million videos on MySpace.com (8.7 videos per viewer).
- The duration of the average online video was 3.5 minutes, up from 3.2 minutes per video in December.
- The duration of the average online video viewed at Megavideo was 24.9 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten.
The 20 Largest Video Websites ranked by a combination of Inbound Links, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast, curtousey of ebizmba.com
Social Bookmarking
We have all seen the nice little icons or share buttons at the bottom of blog posts. Not a only is is a great way to increase traffic, but for the reader its an awesome organizational tool. Social Bookmarking allows you to keep all your favorite posts in one area, make comments and of course share your interests with others, thus getting more visitors.
I have evaluated several social bookmarking tools and plugins. I am currently using the WordPress plugin by addtoany.com. There are several good ones to choose from ShareThis by Alex King and Socialable by Joost de Valk, 2 excellent WordPress developers.
The main elements to look for in your social bookmarking tool is an easy admin interface to customize your links, choose which bookmarking sites to display and where to display them on your page. I like addtoany because it integrates with google analytics, so I can see what posts are bookmarked and to what bookmarking sites.
Ranking & Voting
An easy to implement totally interactive blog feature, allowing your readers to vote for your posts. Not only is this a great way for you to know what your readers like, but it also allows your readers to tell other readers what content the favor on your blog.
Installing a voting plugin to track your blog’s most favorited and highest ranking posts also gives you the ability to display “Best Post” links on your sidebar, making your best content easily accessible.
The WP-PostRatings plugin by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan is excellent! He has written a comprehensible installation and usage guide as well as offering plugin support through his forum. There is a nice admin interface allowing you to choose various rating images and sizes. The plugin is totally configurable.
Commenting
Are you generating comments on your site? Maybe some but not as many as you would like. Comments tell your audience whether or not your content is worth reading. They validate you as an author.
Well first thing is to ask for comments at the end of each post. Something like “hey like this post, please leave me a comment, I will do the same for you”. Now you would have to be honorable and go read their blog as well and if you do, I guarantee you will get more comments.
Make a few enhancements to your comments structure on your blog. Install the wp-Gravatar plugin. It’s built by Automattic, the guys that run WordPress. This will give your comments a more personal feel allowing your visitors to see a picture of their fellow commentaries as well as include an author box, latest comments widget and Makes Gravatars from users with no blog/url link back to your own site. WP-Gravatar supports Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID.
Intense Debate (just installed on my blog) offers blog readers a powerful networking system to establish reputations, link their profiles, make friends and syndicate their comments.
Polls & Surveys
People don’t generally like answering surveys from solicitors calling them at home (at least I don’t) but they love polls and surveys on blogs. Polls and surveys are excellent mediums to interact with your readers. You can ask specific questions of your audience to determine many factors about your business as well as learn exactly what your readers want to know.
wp-polls is a popular WordPress plugin, customizable via templates and css , tons of options and now supports multiple answer selection.
I like polldaddy.com, also developed and supported by our friends at automattic, which virtually guarantees seamless integration with WordPress. You can create and edit your polls from with your admin dashboard.
[polldaddy poll=1491439]
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Contests & Give Aways
Everyone loves something for free and an opportunity to compete for an attractive gift. Many folks in my community will enter a contest because they know it will bring them recognition and at least give them some clout to to rant about on twitter.
Hosting contests enables you not only to engage an individual reader but also to introduce them to others and align them with another community on your blog.
Depending on your industry there may be an affiliate or company that would love to sponsor your contest and even provide some “swag” for your contestants. Ask a fellow colleague or blogger. I would easily give away an hour of my social media consultant time for an advertisement on your contest page.
The easiest way to setup a contest is to simply write a blog post describing the contest, rules and regulations and ask your readers to post their answer in the comments section. Easy as pie. Hmm …
My Favorite {cautionary discretion advised}
Actually ASK your readers! Talk to them. A novel idea, huh? You would be amazed how many people do what you ask them. Some just need to be pointed in the right direction, others need a firm leader. Some folks may do it on their own, but there is a reason that all successful businesses teach their sales force the one most important rule of closing a deal, “Ask for the sale!”
Ask your readers to join you, right here, right now.
Therefore, please SUBSCRIBE to my blog, if you haven’t already. Thanks.
Ask your readers (in your post) to engage with you and start a conversation.
hey meet me on twitter, I will be there every day from 10 am til noon and then again from 3pm til 4pm .. or .. thanks for checking out my post, if you think we could be friends, facebook me! .. or .. I am always looking to network with like minded professionals, connect with me at linkedIN.
Ok, that about wraps it up. I love to hear your feedback. Please feel welcome to share any other techniques you are using to make your blog more interactive and how you engage your readers. If you enjoyed this post, please share.
You can even retweet it on twitter. Just Click Here, thanks so much.
