Creating a high level of engagement for your blog’s target audience is critical to maintaining and keeping your readers engaged. It’s not enough to gain the interest of your audience one time. You need to create content that is valuable enough that it keeps them coming back.
The key to doing this is to focus on specific topics, themes, or types of information. You can do this by creating a format for your content rather than just posting normal paragraphs of information. When you break up the standard format and do something different, it may pay off with more new leads and subscribers.
Here are several different ways to do this. Some of the most popular ones are described below.
1. Product Reviews
Several years ago, blogs started surfacing that featured product reviews. Bloggers reviewed products they liked and used affiliate links to refer people to the site to purchase them. If you plan to set up an affiliate marketing blog, this is an excellent way to introduce your links without seeming too sales-oriented. By giving a lot of relevant and informational content about a product, and leaving an honest review about the “pros” and “cons,” you are developing rapport with your readers. This increases your credibility while referring them to the product link to check it out for themselves.
This may help you with your affiliate marketing career if you wish to embark on this journey. Many successful marketers have made a lot of money doing this. The key is first to build credibility as an honest reviewer. Tell the truth about the product and be sure to include a few you don’t recommend. Then insert your affiliate links among the products you like. This way, you are building a reputation as an honest reviewer while making money on the products you recommend. It doesn’t get much better than that!
In this resource guide from AuthorityHacker, they actually break down the many different components of what makes a successful product review in 2019. Take a look at the screenshot below and the visit their article to learn more about each of the key areas pointed out below.
2. Essays and Education
It may sound boring, but writing an in-depth essay within your blog or offering an eBook download or PDF file within your blog gives readers something extra. They will appreciate the value you are adding by doing this, and they will feel like your blog is worth visiting again. Make sure the file or eBook you offer gives them something related to the topic you are addressing in your blog.
As an example, take a look at how the site, EduBirdie writes all of their content with the end user’s needs in place. They know exactly who their audience is and what they are looking for — which is content writing and education-focused articles. By having nearly all variations of the concept written about on the site, not only are they targeting that exact audience they are also ranking for many relevant keywords in Google for that niche as well.
You can do this too. No matter what space or industry you are in, create something of value for your audience to use, learn from, or even to download for later viewing. This can be done by linking to your eBook or manuscript (essay) that you think people will like and get some benefit from and link out to it from your blog using specific keywords as the anchor text to increase ranking.
3. Tutorials and Walk-Throughs
The online course business is a multi-billion dollar business today. Providing a valuable tutorial or walk-through of a house (such as for a real estate blog) or other scenario is almost like “being there” for the reader. This will increase the reader experience. Adding value by providing information is one great way to connect with your customers and show them that you are offering them value.
You can create an entire course and make it “free” on a platform such as Udemy.com or Lynda.com or create and upload the videos yourself to a separate server or YouTube. Then link out to your course so people can download it. One idea is to offer a short “series” in which you provide a video per week for five weeks, for example. This is a great way to get their attention and keep them coming back for more content to see what you’ll do next. The key is in finding a topic that is important to your audience.
The same can be said of creating content for general audience, then providing them with detailed information on your site. This can also be done to target potential new customers (especially digital marketers) when done correctly.
For example, take a look at this tutorial on How to Download Videos from YouTube Easily. The article is simple enough, and you will find many others like it on Famoid, the social media engagement platform. The end result of this, is a lot of free organic, search traffic, and backlinks/references from other sites.
While the article itself might not be 100% targeted towards their usual customer, it is definitely something a social media manager or marketer might search for and want an answer to. With such content in place, there is always a good chance they can attract new audiences and customers while also delivering high-quality content in the process.
If you don’t know, you need to spend some time getting to know your audience better and “profiling” them someway. You can do this by doing surveys and polls and by looking at the comments on your social media, for starters. Listen to your audience and they’ll tell you what they want. Have a place on your blog for comments, too to find out what they want to see.
4. Provide Links to Valuable Resources or Ebooks
Remembering that the key to getting and keeping good subscribers is to continually provide valuable content for your readers and viewers. If you provide solid content that is of interest to your readers, they will want to share and come back to see what you will do next. Always provide a few links to valuable resources that allows them to take actionable steps to reach one of their goals or find out more information about your topic.
5. Listicles of Top 10 Items that are Trending
Listicles are shortlists of “Top 5” or “Top 10” items that share some common factor such as “the most amazing” or “the strangest” attributes. People are fascinated with these kinds of lists, especially when they are focused on topics that are trending with the general public. Some examples may include “Top Millennials Destined for Greatness in Technology,” or “Top 5 Ways to Win the Love of Your Life.” This takes a little bit of extra research, but it may be worth the time to invest if you want to make an impact on your audience and capture the interest of new people.
Lists are great because they are easy to skim and read through, and often result in more social shares. However, if you want to create a listicle that is going to get attention and is actually worth your time and effort to put together, you will need to follow some quick tips. Bustle recommends the following:
- Remember: Listicle Does Not = Lazy
- Choose Your Angle Wisely
- Map Out Your Subheds
- Know Your Different Listicle Options
- Keep It Tight
- Choose Your Images Wisely
- Don’t Skimp On Your Ending
- Make Sure The Site You’re Pitching Hasn’t Published Your Listicle Already
Great Job! You Made It To the End!
Knowing your audience and their needs and “pain points” is important to your business and your blog. If you want to capture the attention of your target audience and keep it, you need to provide valuable content they will want to come back to over and over.
Create a series, promise more “next week” and invite comments from readers so that you will figure out what it is that matters most to them. It’s fine to do Google Analytics on your sites and blogs, but you need to do some other analysis of your target audience in order to figure out what motivates them to take action and return to your content.
Provide a short free eCourse, links to free stuff like eBooks, and give them more than they thought you would including podcasts and videos to increase your readership. Remember, like a business, your goal is to find your “tribe” and create a group of people who will continue to come back regularly rather than just visit once and never come back.
Become your audience
Put your customers’ needs first and they will appreciate your thoughtfulness and repay you with visits and responses. Remember, you are not trying to get the attention of the whole world, just your own special group who appreciate what you have to offer.
Think about what you’d want to see if you were a customer on your site or blog.
Get creative!
