Getting people to find your blog is one side of the story. Keeping them for a while is another side of it. While making people to find your blog is a tedious and not an easy thing, the saddest part comes when such a hardly earned visitor just chooses to hit the back button.
Apart from clicking the back button (which is not useful to you) what else can a visitor do that could establish engagement on your blog? He/she can
- Stay on and explore more blog posts
- Choose to leave a comment to your blog post
- Find your stuff interesting not only to them but also to their friends or mates and hence consider sharing them on social networks
- Want to stay on a long term and read on your blog’s daily updates and hence subscribe to RSS feeds or email newsletters.
- Becomes a great fan of you and your valuable content, hence chooses to buy your stuff (training courses, e-books, subscription to premium content and so on).
Basically, by engaging your reader you are making him/her do an action. But you cannot just simply achieve reader engagement. Here are some useful tips that help you engage your reader.
Clean layout
This is about the first impression. You either make it or your reader leaves. I won’t be happy to visit a website that has some content written amidst flashing banners asking me to click on, animated gadgets and various badges that “show off” authors talents. The layout must be clean.
Your content should rule the page and ads are secondary. The layout should also be in such a way that the content is clearly present, with nice fonts and without colors (text and background) that strains the eyes.
Link to your old posts
Stand alone posts in a blog are normal. But try to include links to your previous posts, if they are relevant and in the context, in any blog post. Linking to old posts means you are writing relevant and consistent content. Links within a blog post makes it easy for a reader to take action, that is read more of your content.
Two plugins make this easier: Insights and SEO Smart Links
Display popular content
This again is to show more of your old content. In this case, it is not the relevant content, but popular contents. The advantage of showing popular content is that, popular posts change day by day and you get different posts displayed prominently.
This increases the number of links to blog posts displayed in your home page, hence makes it easier for the reader to click.
Your blog’s readers are as busy as you are, even busier than you, searching for content, looking for answers and so on. If they landed on your home page, they should be able to know where to move. It should be easy to search for a term, which means a search box should be available.
There should be a navigation bar which shows all the pages of your blog, say the archive page, about page and so on. Further, an additional navigation bar showing the categories of the blog posts (as shown in this blog) will be of great use.
Fast loading time
As I said just now, people are busy. If your site takes more than 5 seconds to load then your potential visitor has already clicked the back button. So make it easier to load. Have your site light. Do not use so many plugins.
Do not keep the unused plugins deactivated, rather delete them; you can install them later on if you wish to use them. W3 Total cache is a good plugin that helps you to increase the site’s loading speed and increase user experience.
Appropriate keywords
If your blog appears on the search list for “chocolates” and when a reader clicks the link to see that you write about “cycling”, then you suck! Use only the appropriate keywords, write for people not for search engines. Don’t be crazy about getting Google’s attention and use inappropriate keywords. Use only those keywords that match your content.
Call out to action:
This is one of the tips that most bloggers overlook. Sometimes you readers are not that smart or they don’t care about what to do next. Why don’t you guide them? Call them out to take an action.
- You could request them to subscribe to RSS feeds either in a siderbar gadget, or in the header of the blog or at the footer of a post. You can include the benefits of subscriptions (say that you send out newsletters or free stuff and so on).
- You can ask them to leave comments at the end of the post. For this you may also finish the post with a question to the reader.
- You can ask the reader to share the post with their friends via social sharing buttons. You could explicitly include a line like “If you like reading this post, please consider sharing it”.
The responses you get when you ask your readers can be amazing.
Unique content:
If you are not offering unique content, you should not be blogging, seriously. If people find out that you are writing someone else’s stuff, you are screwed. You blog is not the only one in the web. In order to show yourself up among millions of other blogs, you have to be unique.
Even if you are writing magazine or news type of blogs where you report flash news, you should toss in your own ideas or perspectives into your post. Otherwise, why should people find your blog while they can read the news at BBC or CNN website? Unique content is an hook which anchors your visitors with no pain.
UPDATE: That is not it! I have got 4 more ways Don’t forget to check out.
What method do you use to achieve reader engagement?
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Article by JaneSheeba
+Jane is the founder of Problogging Success. She is an expert blogger, consultant, freelance writer and blog designer. Don't forget to get your hands on two FREE Ebooks she offers.
Jane has written 265 awesome posts for Problogging Success.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Good info. here, very helpful for new bloggers. I’ve used W3 Total cache but haven’t seen much of a difference in loading time, but maybe that’s just my internet connection. As for other ways to engage readers, I think it’s really even one step beyond unique content. It’s writing content that you are passionate about and ready to really dig into conversation with others on. It also helps to find other blogs in your topic so that you can keep the conversation going beyond just your own blog. This will eventually trickle back to you and bring in new people to your community.
W3 Cache gives you an option to clear cache each time you do something with a plugin. When prompted, I click “clear cache”. This really makes a difference and improves the speed of the page.
Yes, I totally agree with you “passion” concept. If there is no passion there will be no life in the blog, people won’t hang around dead stuff.
hello!This was a really excellent blog!
I come from roma, I was fortunate to find your theme in digg
Also I get much in your website really thanks very much i will come again
Thanks so much bet365, I am glad you liked my writing
nice read, keep up the good work
Jane,
While I agree with all 8 methods you have mentioned, I feel that the cornerstone of reader engagement is compelling content. You need to promote yourself to get people to your blog - you need to link internally to keep people moving around your blog - but first and foremost is having stuff worth reading in the first place.
“Sometimes you readers are not that smart…” - mine are all geniuses ;~)
Agree with you completely, cheers for the addition
it desire be artistic if you reckon a transference widget on your blog…
Very impressive blog.
Jeswanthy recently posted..கணினியும் நாமும்!
This is an excellent post Jane! I missed this one!! Seriously, much better when compared to others. If you are interested, you may write a guest post on my blog as well! Expect more posts of this sort - related to my niche:)
Mukund recently posted..Common SEO Mistakes That You Should Avoid
I always try to write creatively and I’m very grateful that my followers love it. Responding to their comments is really essential and it’s the ultimate weapon in reader engagement. It builds relationship with your followers and builds your online reputation as well. Connecting to your followers via social media sites is also a great way to make your relationship solid with them and it’s a great way to inform them whenever you have a new post.
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