Imagine that you’re prepping a speech for a large audience. You’re anticipating that you’ll be speaking in front of at least hundreds of attendees.
On the inside, you’re somewhat nervous – but you feel prepared.
You’ve done numerous re-writes on your content. On paper, your words are passionate and charged.
The only remaining step between you and a successful performance is to captivate your audience – whoever they might be. Despite your audience being strangers, your spoken words have the power to charm and excite them, to instill the same passion within them that burns brightly within you.
And yet, once you’ve spoken your final word and look up at them – you’re greeted with silence.
No visible reactions. No questions. No engagement.
Despite transmitting your ideas with vigor and finesse, you get nothing back. Only silence.
Frustrating, right?
If you’ve played around with writing or running a blog, you may have encountered this feeling before.
It’s often disheartening to feel like you’ve put a great deal of effort into writing a particular post, only to be met with an empty comments field.
Maybe you already have consistent blog traffic, but your audience just doesn’t seem to want to engage with your content. What’s the deal?
Well, don’t give up just yet! With these few strategies, you can recapture your audience and have your comments field buzzing with excitement!
Create Thought-Provoking Content
Okay, so this one might seem like a no-brainer. However, if creating interesting content truly was obligatory, nobody would have problems with blog engagement.
As readers engage with your writing, chances are one of two things will happen.
Either they’ll find their curiosity satisfied by the information you’ve provided. Or, in the best case scenario, your words will get their heads spinning beyond their original expectation.
With provocative writing – that is, writing that encourages further thinking – you can spur your audience into generating and then sharing their own ideas and comments that may have arisen from reading your original words.
In a general sense, this might sound challenging. But in the simplest terms, usually it just involves spicing up your content a little!
For example, here at Yocale, we’re often big fans of using compelling statistics to accentuate our writing. Not only do they help to embolden our points by providing supporting evidence, but they’re often surprising in their own right and do an excellent job of “hooking in” our readers further.
And that’s exactly what your aim should be when writing a blog post – how can I hook my readers in? By keeping them in mind and spicing your writing up with fascinating facts, questions, and perspectives, you can ensure that they’ll have something to say by the time they reach the comments field!
Provide “Take-Away” Questions
This strategy ties into what we just mentioned – but it works a bit differently.
As you near the conclusion of your article, redirect the spotlight towards your audience by asking a deep and compelling question that they can’t ignore.
Chances are you’ve seen this strategy employed a lot by various blogs, but like anything, there’s an art to it.
Wrapping up your post with a dispassionate “what do you guys think? Let me know!” might be somewhat compelling, but it won’t entice the average reader into sharing.
Instead, try to come up with questions that are intriguing and – tying into our previous point – provocative. The difference being, these are the kinds of questions that just beg to be answered.
For example, if you’re writing about massage therapy, try including a question that’s relevant to your target audience – something they might have experience or opinions on.
This might be something like:
“Masseuses: what’s the most effective strategy in your experience for building customer loyalty? In your opinion, what works and what doesn’t?”
This kind of question is focused and specific. It’s also targeted at the people who are most likely to be reading the post – massage therapists!
It’ll get their minds churning and who knows – you might end up with some amusing anecdotes in the comments, with follow-up replies from other users.
Use your article as kindling, and set the fire of conversation ablaze with a provocative question!
Make Commenting Easier
Unfortunately, even if your writing has your audience fired-up and ready to share, you might not get to read a word of it.
If your commenting system is overly complicated and discouraging, your readers might begin typing away, only to leave their thoughts unfinished.
It’s sad but true! By overcomplicating your commenting process with account registration and captcha fields, you might be doing more harm than good.
For reference, take a look at your blog right now and sign out of your account if you have to. Find a random article and scroll down to the comments.
Start filling in a comment, and while you do, try to think from a commenter’s perspective.
Are there too many fields to fill out? Do you have to register an account? How difficult is the captcha process?
As you fill out a test comment – attempting to remain impartial – you may discover some valuable insights.
Perhaps you could make guest commenting easier. Or, maybe there’s a better solution for account validation.
Carefully take your users’ time into consideration. Remember: if they don’t feel that their time is being respected by your comments field, they won’t bother with using it.
However, make the conversation more accessible, and you’ll encourage discussion!
If you’re thinking about changing up your comments system, take a look at this post for some ideas.
Reduce Ad Exposure
Credibility is everything!
Bombarding your readers with ads might make sense from a monetization perspective – but it’s obnoxious. Usually, the only thing it ensures is that readers won’t make it to the end of your articles, where the comments typically reside.
It’s certainly a trade-off sacrificing ad exposure for user conversation, but in the end, it tends to be worth it. Your readers will have more respect for your content and site, and therefore, they’ll be more likely to participate in the discussion.
A site that is riddled with ads is a red flag for most readers, and on the technical side, it might also cause your site to lag, impairing the reading experience of your users.
Including some ads is usually fine, but in general, try to keep ads in the sidebar and/or away from the blog content itself. This keeps your blog’s reading experience unfettered and clean, ensuring your readers will feel respected and eager to share!
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There are a lot more strategies to explore for increasing blog engagement, but naturally, we can’t share them all. Try these out and see if you can get the conversation going – we think they’ll really help!
We hope you’ve enjoyed this post! For more business strategy – online and off – keep up with us here at the Yocale blog, five days a week.