PureBlogging

I want to talk a little bit about user engagement. This is a subject I got into in my article for WebProNews about Johns Wu, but when it comes to blogs, it can really make or break you. First of all, if your users are not becoming engaged in your content, then you’re probably doing something wrong.

In other words, if you never get any comments, then something’s not right. This could be for a variety of reasons however.

1. Your Content.

The most obvious reason for lack of user engagement is having bad content. If your content is boring, poorly written (to the extent that it becomes unreadable), or just simply brings nothing new to the table, people are just not going to be very interested in reading it, let alone commenting on it.

2. Visibility

It could also just as easily be that readers can’t find you. If they don’t know you exist, they  can’t very well comment on your artilces either, this is where marketing comes into play (obviously).

3. No Encouragement

Sometimes people need a litle encouragement to actually participate in the conversation. There’s no reason why you can’t come right out and say something like “please let me know what you think in the comments”, or to a more subtle extent, something like, “what do you think?” Let readers know that you really are interested in what they have to say, and this can spark quality discussions, that can often even turn out to be more useful to readers than the original post itself. That is the beauty of a blog as a source of information, you don’t have to rely on one perspective.

Advertisers will salivate at a blog that gets a lot of comments, because not only is that a sign of the blog’s popularity, but is also a strong indication of a like-minded readership (even if opinions vary, the base interests are probably still there), which can make ad targeting easier.

There is no question that user engagement is paramount to the success of most blogs.