Proven Engagement Techniques That Work

 

Hey, dear readers!

I’m going to cut straight to the chase here.

You want a successful blog, right?

But just how do you get a successful blog?

Well, there are a few important elements.

It should go without saying that good content is a must.

The second major factor, I believe, can be summed up in one word:

Engagement.

Now, let me tell you what prompted me to write specifically about this today.

I saw an advert online that was offering some free information about blogging. In a nutshell it was claiming that it would show you how to come up with content quickly and have that content go viral.

Naturally, being a blogger, this caught my interest so I opted in to see what it was all about.

What this free PDF focused on was using certain tools to quickly scour the web for content, place it on your own blog, and that this will give your readers what they want and you will get more views and the chance of your post going viral.

Okay, great in theory.

It even gave a few examples that you could go and check out for yourself. Of course, this is what I did.

The first blog I checked had received something like 28,300 views and around 300 social shares.

Great! But something didn’t seem quite right.

I then checked the comments. A grand total of….. zero.

Hmm…

I don’t know about you, but if I was getting over 28,000 genuine visitors to my blog and over 300 genuine social shares, I would expect at least one comment.

The next blog I checked was more of the same – thousands of views and hundreds of shares. This one did have a few (14, to be precise) comments, but around two thirds of of those were spam and/or trackbacks.

Hmm again…

All the examples given in the PDF followed the same pattern.

Now, just why they were getting so many views and shares but no comments, I don’t know. Perhaps a lot of them were automated and/or maybe the traffic was extremely cold. In any case, with those sorts of numbers I’d expect at least ONE person to leave a comment!

This brings me on to the subject of engagement.

Someone who I feel is one of the every best at engagement is Adrienne Smith. I have mentioned Adrienne many times on my blog and it is very much deserved.

Adrienne is known as the Engagement Superstar.

I didn’t actually know until today how she came about having that title, but she actually wrote a post all about it on her blog back in 2012.

Check it out here: “How To Be An Engagement Superstar“. I’d strongly recommend that you read through this post as it contains some essential blogging advice.

Now, I don’t know how many page views Adrienne’s post got, but notice how many comments she has. And this is always the case on Adrienne’s blog..

Sure, traffic is something that we all want. But what I would always choose over thousands of visitors is warm, TARGETED traffic.

I believe that it’s far more valuable to have lower numbers of visitors who are highly engaged and targeted than a high number that does practically nothing.

So how do you get those warm, targeted visitors?

It’s as I said above – through engagement.

If you just take a look through Adrienne’s blog, the results speak for themselves.

I’d like to also draw your attention to another excellent blog post. This one is, again, from Adrienne’s blog but it’s not actually one of her posts. This one is a guest post from Richard Martin.

In this post, Richard talks about breaking away from the “Me too” crowd. Have a read: “Breaking Away From The Me Too Crowd“.

What both Richard’s and Adrienne’s posts have in common is that they emphasise the importance of using your own voice on your blog.

While content curation and aggregation can be all well and good in certain circumstances, there can really be no substitute for making good use of YOU in your blog.

After all, it is YOUR blog and you want people to connect with YOU!

By all means, make reference to other, valuable content. I have done it myself, not only in this post by highlighting Adrienne’s and Richard’s wisdom and expertise, but I have also featured other bloggers on various occasions and I even aggregated an entire post at one point.

But the thing is, anyone who visits my blog regularly will know that it is I who am behind my blog.

Even someone visiting for the first time should be able to see pretty quickly that my blog is my own and that I infuse so much of myself into it. To me, that stands to reason – it’s my blog and I want my readers to connect with me as a person.

When I do reference something else, it is obvious that it’s not something that’s just been done on autopilot by some software. No, it is clear that I have had a personal hand in it and actually thought about what it is that’s going to be shared.

 

A Few Engagement Tips

 

• Always reply to your visitors’ comments.
• Share other bloggers’ content.
• Thank people when they share your content.
• Leave good, valuable comments on other blogs.
• Offer help and/or advice if and when appropriate. Not for any kind of monetary gain or otherwise. Simply give of yourself and reach out.

Now, it’s true that we all want traffic, comments, subscribers, clicks and buyers. But if you approach your blogging with the goal of engaging, giving and putting others first, then all that good stuff will find its way to you.

I see it time and time again. Bloggers are TRYING to get traffic. TRYING to get subscribers. TRYING to get buyers.

That there is the point – they are trying too hard.

You may have heard me say this before and I make no apologies for repeating myself: if you focus first and foremost on putting yourself out there, giving value and reaching out to people, then you will find that the traffic, comments, subscribers, buyers, etc will largely look after themselves.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with engagement.

How have you found it to improve your blogging?

Have you been attracted to a blogger because they have put into practice some of the the points mentioned in this post?

Let me know in the comments section below! 🙂