(originally posted 7/25/19)
Audience engagement is one of the most important metrics you can track as a blogger. It helps you to understand whether your content is hitting the mark, shows you which topics and subject matters are the most successful and provides a different type of metric than what you might otherwise be measuring.
The problem is that creating this audience engagement is easier said than done, and much of it comes down to testing out different approaches and seeing what gets results for you. With that said, there’s also a certain set of tips and tricks that work well in the vast majority of cases, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
And so without further ado, let’s jump on in and take a look at just a few of the different ways you can keep your audience engaged on your blog site.
1. Ask questions
If you don’t ask, you don’t get! Asking questions can be a great way to build up audience engagement, and many blog providers will allow you to easily embed interactive polls and other functionality that’s specifically designed to boost audience engagement and to get people clicking and interacting with your site.
2. Quote them in the post
Building on from the last point, polls aren’t the only option you have when it comes to encouraging audience engagement. You can also ask your visitors to leave comments, and you can then quote from these comments in future articles to show people that you’re actively listening. Alternatively, consider embedding discussions from social networking sites…anything to show people that it’s a two-way dialogue.
3. Embed videos
Studies show that embedding videos can increase page dwell time by up to 600%, so if you want to increase engagement in terms of time spent on site then it’s a good idea to embed a video now and then. The good thing about embedding videos is that they don’t even have to be your own, allowing you to trawl YouTube, Vimeo and other sites for third-party content that’s relevant to the subject matter.
4. Think visual
Building on from the last point, if your blogs are just huge chunks of text with nothing to break them up, people are going to lose interest and move elsewhere. Remember that many people prefer to skim, so using accessible headings and other ease of use features will make it easier for people to stick with your article instead of taking one look at it and navigating away.
5. Use calls-to-action
Calls-to-action are basically short snippets of text which are designed to encourage your readers to take some sort of action, whether that’s signing up to your email list or whether downloading a sample chapter of your book. Simply telling people how you want them to interact with you can be enough to dramatically improve the engagement rate across your website.
6. Link to related posts
Have you ever noticed how YouTube pages include a list of related videos to the right of the video and at the end of it? The idea is that by linking to related posts, you increase the chances of people seeing something that’s relevant and going on to read another article (or watch another video). This increases the amount of time they spend on site and sends positive messages to search engines.
7. Run A/B tests
A/B tests – also known as split tests and multivariate tests – are essentially scientific style tests in which two different models are tested and the winning variant is adopted as the new norm. For example, you might test two different blog layouts or two different colors on call-to-action buttons. After monitoring the performance of each design, you can start to get a better feel for what causes people to engage with your site.
8. Keep trying new things
It’s true what they say: variety is the spice of life. Most bloggers find that if they keep on keeping on and doing the same thing over and over again, they start to witness diminishing returns. People get bored if you just keep on doing the same thing and they stop visiting your site because they already know what they’ll find there. If you want them to keep on coming back, you need to give them a good reason.
Now that you know how to keep your audience engaged on your blog, it’s over to you to do what you do best – creating great content for your readers. If you follow each of the tips that we’ve shared in this article, you should be off to a good start, and if you pay attention to your metrics and the feedback that you receive along the way, you can keep on refining your approach as time goes on. Good luck!
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Lauren Adley is a writer and editor at essay writing services and https://www.a-writer.com/. She is dedicated to her family, work and friends. She is keen on reading, playing the guitar and traveling. She is interested in educational, marketing and blogging issues. Feel free to connect with her on Twitter.