FREELANCERS UNION BLOG

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How to engage your audience

This is a post from a member of the Freelancers Union community. If you’re interested in sharing your expertise, your story, or some advice you think will help a fellow freelancer out, feel free to send your blog post to us here.

Ever think about blogging? Creating your own blog is easier now than ever. All of the available information is out there, and all you need to do is choose your topic, set up a blog and start writing.

However, with a lot of competition on the blogging scene, you will probably encounter a few challenges. One of the most significant of them is how to engage your audience and make it comment, respond to, and repost your blog entries.

Here we have a few tips on how to build your audience’s interaction for your blog’s ultimate success.

Get to know your audience

The first obvious advice would be to know who your reader is. And it is not as easy as it may seem since one of the main challenges of every blogger is to find a niche and target the right audience. The best way is to create personas, or very detailed descriptions of your typical, ideal readers. For example, “I am writing for Mary, who does gardening as a hobby and has a middle level of income."

The more information this “client portrait” will contain, the better you will understand what information you need to give, and in which form. The right audience will always interact with your blog because the content suits them perfectly.

If you find it hard to get information about your audience, Google Analytics is the first tool to help you define who visits your blog the most. Also, creating surveys and asking your readers to fill them out is one of the most useful methods to get qualitative information about your readers’ likes and needs.

Provide unforgettable user experience

You will want people to come back to your blog page, and for this, you need to take care of their user experience. A few blogging tips may help out in this:

  1. Make interface and navigation as simple as possible. Remove excessive buttons, minimize the number of clicks and subsections, delete old and irrelevant content where possible. You may also speed up the upload time of your page.
  2. Publish epic content. Epic content is the one that your readers will find very practical and very emotionally engaging at the same time. Do not create blog entries just because you are behind schedule on writing them. Make your readers react emotionally to what you are writing.
  3. Create viral entries. Viral by all means is what spreads like a virus, so it is something that people will want to repost and retweet and maybe even email to somebody. These could be lists of useful resources (e.g. “Ten useful websites to create awesome video loops”); practical tips that people will want to remember (“5 tips to start losing weight TODAY”) or very beautiful imagery to grasp the attention of the audience. Ask yourself if the content you are about to post has what it takes to go viral.

Always remember that user experience is all about emotions. Knowing how to produce a needed emotional response to your blog entries will ensure the audience’s engagement.

Other practical tips

Writing good headlines is a good way to keep the readers engaged. As blogging wizard said, the headline is a promise which your content needs to keep. So, it is a good tip to write promising headlines that will make your readers want to continue reading.

Another useful tip is to insert links leading to other bloggers’ posts in your post. This will ensure more traffic and help establish good relationships with the fellow-bloggers that may also mention you someday. Just make sure every mention is relevant to the content of your post and is really practical in terms of helping your audience.

Finally, think about the diversity and frequency of your posts. Text posts should alternate with videos, podcasts, images and interviews. Do not post entries more often than people would want to read them.

All in all, it’s easy to see that people interacting with your content and coming back to it is the ultimate characteristic of a successful blog. Make your readers your first priority, and you will not have to wait long for the results.

Kaya is a 39-year-old sales accountant from Yorkshire. Though I'm not a professional writer it's my hobby to put together articles from time to time.