Get Your Audience Involved In Your Blog
Your audience is your biggest asset, so take advantage of what they have to share with you.
- Ask the readers: If you’re looking for ideas, you can always run a column where you ask the readers a question and invite their answers in comments. You may even choose to expound upon one of the ideas written in a comment and make it a separate blog post (or series, if there are just so many great comments). At the same time, you may want to let the readers ask
- Utilize contact forms: Ensure that you launch your blog with a contact form so that your readers can contact you in some way. After you become an established blogger, you’ll likely be contacted by traditional media for quotes and you’ll likely even be asked to provide help on consulting for related businesses.
- Keep the comments open: The biggest part of a blog from a social media perspective is the ability for community members to be participants and to have a many-to-many relationship (rather than a one-to-many relationship that is so common in traditional media spheres).
- Contests: A great way to build an audience quickly is to hold a contest. Ideally, run a contest while you’re still growing but aren’t too small, since you wouldn’t want to disappoint yourself if there’s little interest. Offer prizes (a free year of your service, a product offering, or in the case of an informational blog, you may be able to solicit prizes from sponsors).
- Polls/Surveys: Engage your readers further by holding polls related to your topic. You can use a number of tools to host polls and surveys, including PollDaddy and Survey Monkey. You can spend one post asking your readers for their inputs and then report on the findings in a follow-up post.
