Blogging is an important consideration for businesses and entrepreneurs today. Without a blog, you lack a key tool for generating more interest in your company or your offerings. Of course, a blog isn’t quite the same as a website. You’ll find that using Wordpress themes is part of the equation here, but it goes far beyond that. You need more than excellent functionality and a good aesthetic if you want to ramp up interest and garner more interaction through your blog.
Why Does Interaction Matter?
First, let’s address a concern that some people hold. That is, there’s a misconception that the blog has outlived its usefulness. With the rise of social media, it’s easy to see how that misunderstanding arose, but it’s not the case. In fact, having a blog is more vital today than ever before. Why is this?
Your website should be your business hub – it’s where your customers come to find your products, make a purchase and learn more about your company as a whole. Your blog also needs to act as a hub, but of a different sort. Your blog should be the hub for all of your social marketing activities, and it needs to garner interaction in order to provide better traction in the online world.
How to Garner Interaction
Ok, now that you know more about why you need a blog, let’s touch on how you go about creating blog posts that actually get people talking. This is a vital consideration – without interaction, you’re not going to become a though leader in your industry. You need to get people excited and get them talking. So, the first step is to determine what type of interaction you want. Surprisingly, there are several types:
- Social media interaction through sharing your posts on sites like Twitter and Facebook (there are others, but those are the two key considerations)
- Comment interaction
- Outbound link interaction (where your readers click a link embedded within the text of your post – also called contextual linking)
- Direct page sharing (this is more common with mobile devices where you can share a page via email, social media or an instant message)
With the number of interaction types, it can be hard to determine exactly which one matters most to you. Actually, the answer is “all of them”. Yes, you read that correctly. They’re all important and you need to make sure that your readers can interact with you and your post in the way that they want.
Build the Functionality
If you’re using one of the many premium WordPress themes out there, adding the types of functionality mentioned above is actually very simple. You can add a plugin that puts social media sharing buttons at the bottom or top of every single post you put up (WordPress’ own Jetpack can do this as well). That takes care of the social media aspect.
You should also make sure that you enable comments on your posts – if they’re disabled, obviously no one can comment and interact with you. It’s also important that you reply to those comments. Thank your visitors for taking the time to interact with you, answer questions, and generally make yourself part of the conversation here.
WordPress offers a plethora of ways to encourage your readers to share your content where they want to – explore the various widgets and plugins available free and see just how much you can accomplish.
All about the Content
Of course, adding tools like social media sharing buttons is only half the battle. While having the ability to share content is important, you need to make sure that you actually have content that people want to share. That can be a huge challenge for many people. In fact, the most common reason blogs fail is that the owner isn’t able to come up with topics and content of interest to their audience. The answer is actually surprisingly simple, though, and can be found in the reason you’re writing a blog post in the first place – your audience.
That’s the key, right there. In order to make your audience want to interact and share your content, you need to write blog posts on topics that they find important or interesting. In order to do that, you need to have a decent understanding of what’s important here.
For instance, if you are a writer, then the shift from print to eBooks, the rise of popular series like 50 Shades of Grey or the question of DRM with eBooks might all be good topics. If you run a B2B company that serves mainly product manufacturers, likely topics might include new manufacturing and production technology, the importance of quality control throughout the entire production process, or how to locate their target customers amidst the sea of other businesses out there.
The right combination of sharing tools and topics will help create blog posts that get interaction and better online traction.
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