ProBlogger: The One Thing You Should Be Doing on Your Blog to Create More Engagement

The One Thing You Should Be Doing on Your Blog to Create More Engagement

Posted: 10 Mar 2014 02:28 PM PDT

This is a guest contribution from Karl Staib of Domino Connection.

Image via Flickr user realpeopleeatplants

Wouldn't it be great if you were getting twice as many blog post comments as you do now?

If people would ask you more questions and add comments, it would help build your community. They spur conversation that might even help you to create new content. And as you may know, people who engage with your blog are more likely to become loyal fans who buy from you and share your content with their tribe.

Google also loves a lot of searchable comments. It helps them understand which posts are worth sending people to. Not to mention the social proof that comes along with a post that has a lot of comments.

Finding how to create this powerful engagement is so important to building an audience that cares what you create. So let’s take a look at how we can do this.

Increasing Your Engaged Blog Community

You know how important an engaged community is for your blog. I don't need to convince you of that.

But what can you do to increase that engagement?

Of course traffic is a big part of how much engagement you generate on your blog, I get that, but we all have to start from one comment to get two, 10 to get 20, and so on.

The one thing you may not be doing is probably the same thing a lot of bloggers make the mistake of not doing.

Let me tell you a little story before we dive deeper.

I have a friend who switched blogging topics. She shut down one site and started another because she wasn't able to monetize her blog. I was worried she would give up on this new blog too. She was too talented not to help people. I know how hard it is to get people to converse on your blog because I've had many blog posts with zero comments.

A funny thing happened though. She got even more comments on the new blog compared to the old blog in less than three months.

Her lighthearted, conversational tone shines through now. She is even more engaging because she enjoys building connections with people in this new topic even more than her old topic.

Small Change, Big Improvement

I noticed a small change she made that I wasn’t sure she was aware that she had made herself. So I asked her, "Why do you think you're getting more comments?"

"I'm not sure. I think I'm more passionate about the subject I guess. No wait it's the value. People can't help reciprocating when something is valuable," she responded.

Now passion is good and value is even better, but a lot of people are passionate and still don't get 18 comments per post on a site that doesn't get a lot of traffic.

So I looked at a few of her old blog posts and I realized the simple change she had made – her older blog posts were passionate, valuable and conversational, but weren’t getting the same engagement. The change she made with this new blog was weaving in open-ended questions and asking for her readers’ ideas throughout her blog.

When you look at your writing, do you feel it’s open to new ideas?

She is so friendly in her writing that it makes you feel like she is just talking to you. When she asks a question, you pause and take a second or two to think about it. Then when you got to the bottom of the post and the comments section, the seed has already been planted and you don't have to work hard to think of something unique to say. You already know something that you want to say.

3 Steps to More Engagement

So here’s my "must do" list to create more conversation on your blog:

Look at your blog's tone of voice and if it's open to new ideas. Do your readers feel like you are talking directly to them? I like to think of writing to just one person in my community. I have a few people I rotate through as I'm writing. Right now I'm thinking of a young man with glasses reading this at the end of his day. That's why using the word "you" is so important as opposed to "I", or someone's name.
Are you passionate about your subject? People can feel when you really care about your content. They want to be a part of this passion.
Now look at the value that you bring to the table. Can people find this information delivered in this manner on other sites, or is yours special or unique?

Once you’ve got friendliness, passion, and value in your blog post, you just need to ask questions that plant seeds and get your readers’ ideas flowing, then hit them with a final question that they just can't resist answering when they get to the bottom of your post, and the comment section is just waiting for them to help the community.

What piece of the blog engagement pie do you think is most important? I’d love to hear your opinion in the comment section

Check out Karl Staib of Domino Connection and his value-packed 30 Day Connection Guide and Customer Conversion e-course to Increase Your Leads and Sales. You'll learn how to find your ideal customers, improve your landing page conversion and what you need to measure so you can convert visitors into buyers.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

The One Thing You Should Be Doing on Your Blog to Create More Engagement

“Skip to the End: 5 Great Ways to Make Your Readers Care” plus 1 more

Skip to the End: 5 Great Ways to Make Your Readers Care

Posted: 09 Mar 2014 09:14 AM PDT

This is a guest contribution from Mike Sowden.

Have you ever taken part in a business presentation that just died on the spot?

Say you’re up there speaking. Nobody is laughing at your jokes. Your throat has dried up. Dark patches of panic-sweat are appearing all over your shirt. You suddenly need the bathroom. What’s the number-one thing on your mind?

Or say you’re cringing in the audience as someone tanks up on stage. It’s awful to behold, it’s making you want to crawl under your seat or fling yourself out the nearest window – but you’re trapped. You have to endure the whole agonising mess. What’s the number-one thing on your mind?

When that happens (and surely it happens to everyone at some point), the number one thing on everyone’s mind in that room is: please let this END.

Endings are supremely powerful ways to motivate people, to build a loyal following, and engineer a lot of sales. Marketers use scarcity tactics to get you caring about endings (“75% off, today only!”). But how can blogs, with their focus on building conversation and community as much as commerce, use endings to hook readers? Here are a few suggestions.

1. Level up

Steve Kamb of Nerd Fitness is a self-confessed gaming geek. He knows the irresistible call of the next rung up the ladder to success. It’s hard to make people care about a distant, lofty goal – and much easier to hook people with near-instant progress. (Just look at how levelling-based mobile gaming exploded in recent years.) Bloggers love publishing personal ‘bucket lists’ – but for his site, Kamb went one better and created his ‘Epic Quest For Awesome‘, complete with an experience points rule system. It’s now front and centre (ok, it’s top-right) of his landing page for Nerd Fitness and is clearly part of his strategy for making people care about what he’s doing.

What You Can Do: find a cool, exciting way to show incremental progress towards a clearly-defined set of goals – but also make sure that at least some of those goals serve your site and its readers as much as yourself.

2. Vaguebooking

You know those people who post things on Facebook like “You-know-who is doing you-know-what…AGAIN!” and “Worst day ever. I DONT WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT!”?

Let’s agree that’s always annoying. Let’s also agree that it usually works – or we wouldn’t be annoyed, right? We’d breeze past without wanting to know more. Instead, we’re momentarily irked because we’re presented with an imperfect view of something potentially interesting, and against our own wishes, we want closure. Maybe we think we don’t care, but we still want to know the facts so we can decide we don’t care.

What You Can Do: lay subtle (or not so subtle) hints about the direction you’re taking your blog, giving the reader a sense that you know way more than you’re telling – which is really useful for those times when you’re making it up as you go along.

3. Attempt the Barely Possible…

There are few things that motivate people quite like a harebrained adventure with an apparently slim chance of success. It may be wise to chase an end goal for your blog that’s modest in scope and entirely achievable – but that’s a really poor way to market it. Make the story of your blog larger than life. Make it so ambitious that you’ll have people questioning your sanity, or at least your sense of proportion. I wonder how many people truly believed Chris Guillebeau would find a way to visit all 193 United Nations member states, an 11-year quest that would end on his 35th birthday? That’s what he achieved – and by making it a hefty challenge for himself, he raised the investment stakes with his readers.

What You Can Do: decide to do something that will appear both meaningful and crazy to your readers – and then announce it, in a serious, credible way. Do it right, and you have yourselves a little movement of people who really believe you can do this…and, of course, a bunch of people who want to see you fall flat on your face. So let’s talk about that right now..

4. …And Fail.

Whenever you and your blog attempt to do something different, you run the risk of failure. If you’re attempting something big, you risk BIG failure. The cataclysmic, huge smoking crater version that you’ll never forget being part of. To fail is to feel bad – there’s absolutely no denying it. But the odd thing about failure is it can be attractive to anyone watching – and that’s not because they’re being mean.

Human beings are drawn to dark and terrible stories. Stories of fear and woe and everything best avoided in real life. Stories of failure. Why? Science writer Jonathan Gottschall reckons it may be because storytelling arose as a way to keep us alive. What happens if I come down out of this tree and stroll past that sabre-toothed tiger? My story says: “you’d have a really bad day.” My story keeps me alive – and now I trust my story, even though it’s a horrible thing that will give me nightmares for the rest of my life. (Thanks, story.)

Similarly, it’s possible the modern appetite for dark, miserable stories is born of a need to avoid those events ourselves – in which case, a story of failure is deeply compelling. What lessons can we learn from someone who did it the wrong way? It’s awesome storytelling. In the words of Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coates: “You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.”

5. Start with the End

A few months back, the TV show Breaking Bad delivered its final few episodes. Its viewing figures went through the roof, up tenfold from its first season premiere. In fact, Breaking Bad‘s popularity rose continuously through its 5-season run. Increasingly and in larger and larger numbers, people really cared.

Why? The writing was amazing, the acting was literally Emmy award-winning, the cinematography was to die for – plenty of creative reasons. But a key part of Breaking Bad‘s appeal was how it used its endings. Its signature opener was a glimpse of things to come later in the episode – often baffling, bizarre, without the context of the story to support it. You didn’t know why mild-mannered Walter White was standing in the road in his underwear, pointing a gun towards approaching police sirens – and you had to keep watching to find out, as the story flashed back to “x hours earlier”. Later episodes would flash forward entire seasons, eventually foreshadowing the finale itself – a place where terrible (but unspecified) things have happened. As the final episodes approaches, audiences knew enough of the ending to be whipped into a frenzy of anticipation and speculation…and the show ended with its highest viewing figures ever.

All because the Breaking Bad team knew exactly what to do with their endings.

What You Can Do: decide where your blog is ultimately going, and start telling that story from the very beginning. You don’t have to give away very much – but unlike the vaguebooking approach above, you’re not showing the journey, you’re showing the destination. Yes, this is tricky, and in the face of great uncertainty, it will probably require a lot of courage and strength of purpose. But the magical thing about foreshadowing is that it works both ways. Your audience will start to care more, because you’ll look like you know where you’re taking them – and you’ll care more as well. The more you communicate that ending, the more of a sense of purpose you’ll feel and the more likely you will be to actually get there. You will truly know why you blog – and isn’t that an end worth chasing?

Mike Sowden is a freelance travel writer and storytelling consultant from the north of England (UK). Find him at Fevered Mutterings - or maybe walking across some lonely, rain-lashed British hillside with a backpack, having “fun”.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Skip to the End: 5 Great Ways to Make Your Readers Care

Beginner Week – Discussion: What Did You Find Hardest as a New Blogger?

Posted: 07 Mar 2014 08:08 AM PST

With all the chat around new blog tips, mistakes made, and resources used, we’ve got to thinking – what were the biggest obstacles to you all when you first started out blogging? Was it finding readers, tech stuff, or design? Perhaps it was navigating social media, or even finding content to write? I do know a lot of the people I’ve spoken to have all wondered how much of “themselves” they should put in their posts. And where’s the line of overshare?

Feel free to have a conversation about what stumped you and perhaps how you overcame it. I’m willing to bet it’s going to be so useful to other readers. Your tip might be the one thing they need to read today!

Today is the last day to get 50% off ProBlogger’s Guide to Your First Week of Blogging – hop to it!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Beginner Week – Discussion: What Did You Find Hardest as a New Blogger?

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