One of the most difficult things about blogging is trying to get enough interaction from your readers to make it feel like all your efforts aren’t for nothing. Spending weeks working on a stellar blog just to have 8 people read it and no one comment or share it can make any writer feel as if they’ve wasted their time.
But for those of you who find yourself in this predicament, there is hope for increasing the amount of interaction your readers have with your blogs. To get you started down the path of heavily commented on and shared blogs, here are three tips for encouraging your readers to interact more with your blog.
Give Readers Something to Care About
While your blog could be about one of a million topics, you can always find something that pulls at the heart strings of your readers and makes them care a little deeper. Regardless of your niche, try to make it a point to give a human face to blogs that you want to get some interaction traction. By giving your readers something or someone to care about, they will feel more inclined to share or comment on your content.
But how can you get your readers to care? A great way to do this is to get philanthropic. You could share information about a good cause in your industry and then ask your readers to contribute to the cause or to whom the cause will be helping. Not only will you be getting the word out about something or someone who needs help, but the interaction your readers give will be mutually beneficial to everyone involved.
Have Good Comment Etiquette
If you once had a good amount of comments and interaction with your blog but that has since ceased, you may have an issue with how you work with your comments section. If it’s difficult to make a comment on your blog or it takes weeks for interactions to be approved for public view, readers aren’t likely to go through the process.
To make commenting and interacting with your blog easier, Charlene Kingston of Social Media Examiner suggests working on aspects of comment etiquette like making sure the settings are done correctly, writing a comment policy, responding to all comments, and building a sense of community with your interactions. By showing your readers that you have good comment etiquette, you will naturally encourage them to be more interactive with your blogs.
Spread the Word
You’ve got to understand that if no one is reading your blog, no one will be interacting with your blog. In fact, Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net claims that only 9 percent of online communitiy users comment or interact with blogs at all. So if you can’t get your blog out to enough people, the chances of you getting interactions, let alone meaningful interactions, are pretty slim.
For this reason, you’ve got to promote your blog and share it around online communities as much as possible. The more eyes you’re able to get on your content, the more chances you have of getting someone to interact with what you’ve written. If you’re having trouble getting readers organically, you may want to consider doing paid promotion on social media to further the reach of your blog.
Blogs can get great interaction from readers if they are set up for interaction success, get a high enough number of contributing readers, and are able to give those readers something to care about and feel inspired to interact with. If you’re able to create blogs that can do all three of these things, you’ll be well on your way to having blogs with pages of meaningful comments and hundreds of shares.
Originally posted on July 22, 2015 @ 1:35 am