Do you want your blog or social media followers to interact and engage with you more? Are you dying to create amazing friendships online? The number one way that you can encourage your readers to speak up is to be authentic. Creating a real and honest personality online can make or break the engagement you receive from your readers, followers, family, or whoever you seek to interact with.
First off, lets talk about why it is important to get your readers to speak up. Engagement on your blog posts, within your social channels, and through your email newsletter can really make or break the sales and revenue that you bring in from your blog. Another reason that reader engagement in important is because it creates a community that encourages people to come back to over and over again (which is what we are going to be focusing on today).
This post is not about how to gain followers, but rather how to love and honor the followers that you currently have. This post is about creating a relationship with a current reader that may have been unwilling to speak up. When you start focusing on the readers you have currently, and quit focusing on the number of readers you are striving to get, you will see that more readers will come naturally.
Study your followers.
The first step in creating any relationship is to understand the other person and find common ground. There are plenty of tools out there that can help you do this! The main things to look at are when your readers are online, what they do when they are online, and how they interact with different articles and social media posts.
Make it easy.
Okay, so our ultimate goal here is to get your readers to engage with your content. And they're never going to do that if its a complicated process. If I go to a bloggers site and their comment button is hidden away, or I have to create 50 million accounts just to say a few simple sentences, then I am definitely not going to do it. Make sure that you are making interaction easy and fluid--your readers should never have to even think about it.
Create interesting Call-To-Actions.
A call-to-action is basically you telling your readers to do something next. When someone reads all of the way down to the bottom of your blog post then you need to make sure you give them something to do so that way they stick around. I often instruct my readers to comment, but you can also lead them to other posts, tell them to follow you on social media, or anything else.
Conduct a survey.
I conducted a survey at the beginning of the year to kind of get a feel of what my readers wanted. A survey is a great way to ask your readers for an opinion in an anonymous way. Often times readers might have great things to say, but don't want to share their opinions in the comments where there name is associated with their words. So, giving them the chance to share their thoughts in a detached manner might work out well for you if you aren't getting as many comments as you would like.
Respond to all comments.
And finally, to make sure that your audience is interested in engaging and speaking with you, make sure that you are responding to all comments and making your blog a community meant for talking with one another. If you are simply wanting comments to come in and not doing anything with them, then think again. As a vigorous commenter, I love it when a blogger responds!! It gives their blog a more personal touch and creates a connection that's going to keep me coming back.
Encouraging your readers to speak up can be a long challenge. Just stick with it and keep in mind that nothing comes fast or easy. Focus on creating an open and honest community, show your personality, and engagement will come naturally.
If you have any more tips and tricks about getting your readers to engage with you on your blog please, please, please let me know in the comment section below! I'd love to hear your tips and learn from you as well.
