Getting people to your blog is something everyone wants to know more about, and there’s no shortage of blog posts about that. But what happens after people arrive? Are you blowing a chance to engage them because you haven’t even thought about an engagement strategy? I’m going to show you how to do five simple things that will get your readers engaging more with your blog. If you can increase reader engagement, you’ll get more comments, subscribers, and visitors. But first, we need to understand…
How Readers Engage with Your Blog
Before we cover five simple ways we can dramatically improve engagement on our blogs, we need to know the ways in which readers will engage. Readers will:
- Leave a comment
- Share the post via social media
- Explore further and read other content
- Subscribe to the blog via RSS feed
- Subscribe to the blog or to your email newsletter via email
Knowing these five methods of engagement provides us with our goals for increasing engagement: we need ways of getting these five actions to occur more often.
Increase Comments
We definitely want to increase the number of comments on our posts. When other readers see a lively comment section, they want to jump in, too. When new visitors see a rockin’ comment section, they are much more likely to subscribe. Let me share with you some easy strategies that work:
- Ask readers to share their thoughts in the comments! This is such a simple tip, but so many bloggers still don’t do it. People will respond to an invitation if you offer one.
- Respond to readers’ comments with open-ended questions to further the discussion. Don’t just thank readers for their comments or praise, or answer their questions and then drop the matter. Keep things rolling by asking questions back.
- Use engagement tools. If you’re using WordPress on your own hosted domain (which of course you should be), you can add a few choice plugins to increase the likelihood of reader engagement with comments. You definitely want to use a plugin that lets people subscribe to comments. Also, use the threaded/nested comments feature of WordPress to make your comments more conversational.
Increase Sharing on Social Media
Social Media has become a huge point of engagement for people. You want to make your posts easy to share by using some kind of social media sharing tool on your blog. ShareThis and AddThis are two of the web’s most popular sharing tools that can be used with any blog software.
You can kill two birds with one stone by using a comment tool that also doubles as a social media sharing tool. Check out the possibility of integrating Disqus or Intense Debate into your blog. Both of these services work on all major blog systems.
Increase Further Exploration
This is all about getting people past the first page of your blog they land on. There are several ways we can make it easy for readers to engage more deeply with our blog’s content:
- Use the YARPP plugin. The Yet Another Related Posts Plugin is the best out of large range of similar plugins (hence the tongue-in-cheek name). This customizable but easy-to-use plugin lists a series of post links at the end of the current post in a WordPress blog. This invites people to explore further on a related topic that may interest them.
- Make liberal use of links to your own content in posts. A link is always an invitation to click, to go someplace else, to go off on a tangent. Use as many links back to your own posts as you can. You’ll get more click-throughs to other posts (this is also good for blog SEO).
- Don’t put full posts on your blog’s home page. All it takes is that one click to get a visitor moving down the path of engagement. If there is no reason to commit to that first click, there can be no going deeper into the site. One of the easiest ways to do this is to only publish post excerpts on your blog’s homepage. One click leads to two clicks, which leads to three, and so forth.
Increase RSS Subscribers
Much has been written on this subject alone, but here a few simple ways to increase your RSS subscribers:
- Ask people to subscribe at the end of your post. The trick to make this even easier is to not have to do it every time manually. I suggest you use the Headway Theme for your WordPress blog, because you can use its “easy hooks” system to just insert whatever content you want at the end of every post automatically. Barring that, here’s a tip: keep this text handy in a text editor on a permanent basis and just copy/paste at the end of your post.
- Use FeedBurner’s subscription tools. FeedBurner is the world’s most popular feed delivery service. When you use them to make your feed easier to work with, they give you copy & paste code you can use to let readers subscribe to your blog. You can use WordPress plugins, Headway, or simply an HTML/text widget in WordPress to put your signup area at the top right of the page where everyone will see it.
Increase Email Subscribers
If you have an email newsletter that delivers different content than your blog, you’ll definitely need a way to get subscribers to it. If you don’t want to have a separate email newsletter, you at least want to let people subscribe to the blog posts by email. And you want to make these as easy as possible.
- Use Aweber to start an email newsletter for your blog. Aweber is the web’s most popular email list manager service. Using them isn’t complicated, but be prepared to spend some time setting up your list and learning its ins and outs (they provide lots of great video and written tutorials). Aweber will provide you with copy & paste code for your email list sign up forms.
- Use FeedBurner to let people subscribe to your blog posts by email instead of with a feed reader. Most people still have no idea what RSS is. That means that if the only way they can subscribe to your blog is via RSS, you’re simply losing a lot of people. Make subscribing dead simple for them: give them the email option. FeedBurner does this. I put the code for this in the same sidebar widget as my RSS subscription link so peple can do whichever they feel more comfortable with.
Over to You
Some of you may be reading this and wondering why I didn’t include tactics such as offer a download as an incentive for subscribing. The reason why is because I wanted this post to be true to its headline. Everything in this post is simple to do. Most of these tactics involve nothing more than you remembering to do something or adding a new plugin or service to your blog. Anybody could do the stuff in this post.
But I’m sure I didn’t think of everything, and that’s where you come in. What are your engagement tips? We’d love to hear them. Please share them with us in the comments below and make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss future posts here.
Also don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed for Blog For Profit. That way you won’t miss a single installment of 31-Days to Kick Your blog in the Butt.
