Posted by Every business owner today knows that running an engaging business blog is vital to building better online brand visibility. Producing useful blog content and articles consistently is an integral part of any website’s search engine optimization (SEO) and holistic marketing strategy.
However, merely churning out blog post after blog post that barely anyone reads, let alone shares, will be of little value to you in terms of ROI.
Now, you may have already garnered a decent amount of traffic on your business blog, but if your audience doesn’t engage with your content, then it’s time to revamp your content.
That is; if you want to boost your blog’s engagement (comments, newsletter subscribers, etc.) and social shares, here’s how to do just that:
Be Bold and Fresh
First and foremost, make it a point to publish fresh, previously unpublished content on your blog. The modern reader is savvy enough to recognize whether your content is fresh or regurgitated/republished from another source.
Needless to say, nobody likes rehashed content — people appreciate and desire originality (or at least some levels of it). If your post is unique to your blog, with your unique brand voice, people will be much more likely to comment and share.
Thus, always create original content that your audience can’t find elsewhere on the internet. Granted, it would require more time and effort investments, but it would also be far more rewarding.
Furthermore, be bold and confident with your words. Rather than giving simple advice, add a touch of personality to your content. Have a conversation with the readers like you’re talking to them face to face.
Being witty, controversial, and bold sparks a two-way discussion. For instance, you can make an audacious assertion in the blog post’s title itself, but then ensure you present your opinion or a solid solution in the body of the post.
Source: DreamGrow
You see, humans are far more inclined to voice their opinion if they don’t agree with your words. Consequently, if you want to invite a discussion (and social shares from the readers who are on your side), being a bit controversial in your content can be helpful.
That said, don’t get carried away by creating too much controversy or it may backfire and become self-defeating for your brand.
Make it More Visual
As you’ve likely heard, humans are visual creatures, with 90% of information transmitted to the brain being visual. What’s more, the modern audience has the attention span that’s worse than that of a goldfish.
Accordingly, writing blog posts that look like blocks of huge paragraphs, with little-to-no imagery to aid understanding, isn’t advisable at all. Most people today dread reading long, purely text-based articles and prefer content that’s more visual.
In order to make your posts more interesting, you absolutely must separate paragraphs (keep all paras short, by the way) with interesting graphics and imagery.
From something as simple as stock images to custom-designed illustrations, visuals make your content more exciting, break the tedium of text, and enhance the readability and shareability of your content.
For example, you can allow an option for readers to “Pin it” when they hover over an image that you’ve included in the post, so they can easily save your piece on their Pinterest account to revisit your blog later.
Moreover, embedding videos within your blog posts not only substantially boosts audience engagement in terms of social shares, but also helps increase the average time on page (reader remains hooked to your post), which in turn, helps your rankings on Google.
Thus, make sure all your blog posts have numerous visuals (images and videos) sensibly sprinkled between text.
Promote Your Content on Social Media
To get the social sharing ball rolling, never hesitate to shamelessly share your own posts on all social media channels, using both your personal and your brand’s social media handles. And don’t do it just once and forget about it, but share the same post multiple times over a span of a few weeks to ensure every post gets the maximum possible attention from your followers.
Promoting your blog posts on social media facilitates engagement in terms of likes, comments, shares, retweets, and most importantly, click-throughs to your blog. And the more people that land on your blog through social media, the better are the odds of your post earning further social shares from those satisfied readers.
Note that when sharing your blog posts on social media using your business’s social media handles, it is a good idea to use a custom URL shortener to create short, branded URLs that help increase trust in your link and thus, the click-through rate. Apart from helping with consistent branding, such custom links allow you to get real-time analytics and insights into what content’s performing well on social media and what’s not.
Create Interactive Content
As the name suggests, interactive content is content specifically designed for audience engagement. Examples include a fun quiz or poll, an interactive infographic, a simple calculator, or even a 360-degree video.
Including some interactive content on your business blog encourages people to, well, interact with your content by clicking answers and entering information, which can considerably boost the average time on page and thus, your SEO. Besides, you can also use interactive content to collect email addresses from your visitors, turning prospects into leads.
For example, if it is an entertaining short quiz, your audience would be motivated to answer all the questions and at the end of the quiz, you can ask them for their email address where the results will be sent.
Long story short, interactive content can be much more exciting than plain text, which consequently can compel users to share your content on their social media channels.
Have Striking Social Sharing Buttons
Lastly, at the risk of sounding ridiculously obvious, it can happen that readers indeed enjoyed your blog post but because there weren’t any prominent social sharing buttons, they forgot to share it.
Thus, making your social sharing buttons more conspicuous by allowing them to float on the side of the blog post (in a non-intrusive way) can certainly help increase social shares of your posts.
Source: Blog Tyrant
You can even use a tool like Click to Tweet (or a WordPress plugin if you’re a WP user) to highlight specific sentences or quotes pop out as easily tweetable text. In the end, it’s all about making it as easy as possible for the reader to share your content on their social media.
Over to You
Content engagement is a pivotal metric that’s often forgotten, as most businesses are too fixated on manufacturing more quantity of content rather than ensuring every piece is of the highest quality (thus, being more shareworthy and memorable).
Simply put, if a large chunk of your readers isn’t sharing your content or engaging with it in any way, then you are not realizing the true potential and ROI of blogging. In fact, higher content engagement also translates to higher rankings on Google.
There’s no denying that in an ocean of humdrum blogs crowding the internet today, getting your audience to be actively interested in what you have to say is a tough job. But by following the best practices discussed above, you can surely get your audience to be more active and build a reader base that truly cares about your content, and is willing to share your blog with their own followers.
So, how would you go about boosting your blog’s engagement and social visibility? Let us know in the comments below!
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