Creating Engaging Content and Encouraging Reader Engagement

Hey, it’s Darren from ProBlogger here. Welcome to episode 116 of the ProBlogger Podcast, where we’re working through a series (at the moment) on how to warm your readers up. Back in episode 112, I introduced to you four different stages of warming your readers up. In the next episode 113, I talked about how to get the first eyeball, how to get a first time visitor to your blog. Episode 114, I talked about getting people that next step into becoming interested in your blog, helping them to give your blog a second look. In the last episode, 115, I talked about how to get people to subscribe, to connect with you, which is really crucial if we want an ongoing relationship.

Today, in 116, I want to talk about how to get engagement. This is the final step in this particular process of getting people warmed up. Many times, we have readers who are subscribed or they’re connected to us on a social network but they never comment. They never actually retweet, they ever share. They never engage with us. We all know a relationship is really a two-sided thing. We’re talking a lot as bloggers but how do we get our readers to talk back to us? That’s what I wanted to get into in today’s episode and I’m going to give you some strategies for doing just that.

I do have one more podcast in this particular series to come. In episode 117, we’re going to do a case study, which pulls together these four different stages and I’m going to interview someone who has developed a bit of a system to take people from becoming aware, through to becoming fully engaged. If you want to get that one, you need to subscribe, either to our newsletter, ProBlogger Plus on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/116, or you can subscribe to us on iTunes, or your favorite podcast listening network. Let’s get into today’s show.

Today, we’re talking about getting engagement with our readers, Readers, hopefully by now, have eyeballed us for the first time, they’ve become a little bit interested in what we’re doing, they’ve been compelled to subscribe to our list and maybe even connected with us on social media, but they’re passive, they’re lurking.

This is a major frustration for many of us as bloggers. I was, just literally five minutes ago, looking in my AWeber email system, looking at the amount of people who open emails and it’s a minority of people. This is the case for most people who send emails. I was just looking at my Facebook page and thinking, “You know, I just put that Facebook post up,” and of course Facebook filters how many people see that. Even the people who see it, so few of them comment, like, or share.

How do we get people to engage with us? How do we get them to participate with us? How are we going to get them out of passivity, out of lurking, to fully contributing to our site? That’s what I want to talk about today, I want to give you some strategies for doing that.

Before I give you some strategies though, I want to give you an overarching principle that I really do believe in. We need to be the community that we want to have. If we want engagement, we need to be engaging and this is a big challenge to us all as bloggers. Now, I know some of you, this community, this engagement just oozes out of you. I can think as I’m speaking to you right now, there are a few bloggers who just breathe into this. My wife’s pretty good at this. She responds to every comment. She sees every person who engages with her on Instagram and is commenting backing going and liking their pages. She just loves these kind of engagements.

Whereas, others of us, this is a bit of an area of struggle. We need to realize that if we want people to engage with us we need to engage with them. We need to be engaging. We need to be the community that we want to have and that is a commitment. That’s a mind shift that’s something that we need to commit to doing. As I look back over the years of my own blogs, there’s been times where I’ve been really good at this and has been other times where this has been lacking and my blogs have suffered as a result of me not engaging as much as I could have.

It is a big thing that we need to commit to. Are you willing to be engaging? Are you willing to be the community that you want to have? Hopefully, the answer is yes, because if it’s not, some of the strategies I’m going to give you aren’t going to really take you so far. Be the community you want to have.

The first thing I want to talk about strategically is about helping you readers to get on board. There is this thing called onboarding. Some of you will have heard of it, some of you will have already done some onboarding of your readers. If you imagine a train conductor helping people on board the train, you can help your readers to get on board your blog. This is particularly relevant if you have an email list.

We talked in the last episode (episode 115) about how to get people onto your list. It’s so important to have that email list that you list is the thing that you control, but how do you get people on board what you’re trying to build through that email list? One of the best things that you can do with an email list is to set up an auto-responder that helps your readers to get on board what you are trying to achieve with your blog.

Now, I talked more in depth about auto-responders back in episode 70 and I would encourage you to go back and listen to that particular one because auto-responders can be used in a number of ways to build traffic to your blog, to sell your products, but most importantly for this particular episode, they can be really useful to help you to get your readers on board and to become engaged with what you are on about.

I would give you an example of someone who I think or couple people who I think use an auto-responder really well and it’s a very simple auto-responder sequence, but it’s one that I think is very effective and it comes from Caz and Craig Makepeace at yTravel.

I used Caz and Craig a few episodes ago to show you their start here page, which (I think) is a really great example of a start here page, but you can also sign-up for their email newsletter and you will see this great little email sequence that they send out, set-up through an autoresponder. 

Now, the best way for you to experience that is to sign-up and it’s a great newsletter to sign up for, particularly if you’re interested in traveling as a family. Just really briefly, I want to point out a couple things in the first few emails that they send. The first email that they send, particularly thanks you for joining their email list. It talks a little bit about what the email will be used for. It begins to set some expectations of when emails will be sent, so it says, “Every Wednesday you’ll receive an email with a personal inspiring message.”

It gets people looking forward to when those emails will come. It encourages people to add their email address to the address list to help with deliver ability of the emails. It gives people a free audio download, so there’s some generosity there and this is part of how they get people to sign-up, it’s an opt-in, as we talked about in our last episode. Opt-ins are really a great way to get people subscribing, so they deliver that opt-in.

Then, they signal forward, that build some anticipation that they’ll not only get that opt-in but there’s something else coming in a future email, in a couple emails’ time, so they’re building at a bit of anticipation there.

What I love about the first email that Caz and Craig send is that they invite their readers to reply. Now, this is a big call. If you are getting a lot of subscribers and you’re asking readers to reply to you, that’s going to increase some workload for you. Caz and Craig have got this little invitation to reply and to introduce yourself if you’re a subscriber.

This is how it reads, it says, “Reply now and introduce yourself. Tell us what is your travel dream, why travel a priority for you and what is the biggest obstacle in your way right now? How can we help?” This is an invitation to a relationship and I love the fact that the very first email that anyone ever sees from Caz and Craig has this section, inviting people to introduce themselves, which is the start of any relationship, but not only that, the three questions that they ask get their readers to tap into their dreams.

Remember, we talked about dreams a few episodes ago, where I suggested the exercise of brainstorming, what you readers achievements, their gains that they want would be. Caz and Craig are actually asking the readers to tell them about the things that they want to achieve.

The second question is getting their readers to tell them about the priority, why travel is a priority to them. Again, this is an aspirational thing. This is helping them not only to start a conversation with their readers, but it’s also really useful information about their readers.

The last question they ask is, “What’s the biggest obstacle in your way of travel right now?” and these taps into the pain, the obstacles, the problems of their readers.

I love this approach. One, it invites a conversation and people do reply to this email every day, Caz tells me she gets a lot of emails, but number two, it gives Caz and Craig a lot of really great information about the aspirations of their Readers and the pain and the obstacles of their readers, which is going to help them to serve those readers even better to create content that helps them a lot.

I think this is just a brilliant technique to use in the first email that you send it’s going to help your readers to become engaged and that’s what these particular email is all about. Email number two in the email sequence is, again, has some of the same types of things, there’s a bit of generosity there, they remind their readers of the free audio that they’ve sent.

Then, they talk about how they’re going to help their readers to make travel part of their life. Here, they’re promising. They’re making a promise of the gain here. Then, they go into trying to get that reader back again and they suggest three links that they should read. These three links really closely relate to the pain of their readers and the gains that they want to have.

They’re trying to get people back to the site and this is about getting them to come back again to become re-engaged, which is again is really important. It’s one thing to get people to your site the first time, it’s really important that you get them back there within a day or two of them being there. This reinforces your brand to get some used to showing up on your site.

Ideally for fully warmed-up reader, you want them to be hitting your site at least once a week, if not more regularly than that. You’ve got to train those subscribers that you’ve got to come back again and to realize that there’s fresh content happening again and again. They point out that there’s some useful stuff on their site.

Again, at the end of all this particular email (the second email in the sequence), they have another invitation to reply. It’s a PS, it says, “P.S. Don’t forget to reply to our emails at any time to tell us any content you feel is missing on our site that you like us to write about.” There’s this encouragement to reply again going on there.

The third email, similar type of thing, but the third email (I think) is really great because it taps into the pain of their readers. Here’s what they write in the middle of that third email, “We’ve discovered that there are five reasons why you won’t travel,” and I reckon they got those five reasons why people don’t want to travel from the first email where they ask their readers to tell them why they don’t travel.

Their readers have already told them, “This is why I don’t travel,” and now they’re presenting them with this series of blog posts to help people to overcome these barriers. They say, “We’ve discovered there are five main reasons why you won’t travel. We wrote a series of posts to help you to discover ways to overcome these barriers.”

In the first email, they ask them what are your obstacles, then in their third email, they give pain relief and they suggest three articles that will help you to overcome the things you’ve probably already told us about in email number one.

Again, this is about getting people back to the site, but they’re getting people back to the site to get those quick wins that we’re talking about a few episodes ago, to have a fist pump moment, to remove a barrier, to help relieve pain. I love these email sequences and I highly recommend that you go and sign up for it, particularly if you’re interested in travel, but just to learn from Caz and Craig as well.

Now, I’m going to give you, in the next episode, another case study of someone else who’s done a very similar type of thing and we’ll walk through that. I really would encourage you to think carefully about those first emails that you send. There are some things that you want to do in those first emails to get your readers on board, to train them to come back to your site, to get them to some of that fist pump content that’s going to bring about a quick win and to invite a relationship, to signal to your readers that you are interested in engaging with them, that you want them to talk to you rather than just consume the content that you’re creating.

Work out what it is that you want to achieve with your readers. What’s the ideal? Do you want an engaging relationship? Then signal that you readers in those first few emails, by getting them used to coming back to your site. It’s important, you want to reinforce your brand, you want to reinforce that you are a helpful destination.

Another strategy that you can use to get fully engaged readers is to create (as a part of your regular production of content) engaging content. Now, this can come through in pretty much every post you write, simply by asking a question at the end of every post, asking for engagement, but you can also create blog posts and content for your blog that is all about engagement.

A very simple way to do this is to have a discussion post. Instead of writing a post where you share information, you have a blog post that is centered around a question and you do not give the answer to that question, you ask your readers what the answer is for them. You get them to share this story or their opinion or their experience or an example of something that they would bring to that particular discussion.

An example of this, very early on in Digital Photography School, I got a question from a reader that I simply couldn’t answer. It was, “How do I photograph a funeral?” this reader had been asked to photograph a funeral which sounds very morbid, but they had family members who weren’t able to be at that particular funeral and so she’d been asked to photograph the funeral and that was a daunting thing for her, so she emailed me. I’ve never done that. I didn’t know the answer to it, but I decided to write a post about the question and I opened it up for my readers to give their thoughts on this particular question.

This is one of the first times I ever did a reader discussion post on Digital Photography School and it worked really well. We had an amazing discussion. Some really helpful readers came on who’d had experience in that or at least who had suggestions and it showed me the power of opening a discussion in your readership.

That is one example of a post that might help to get a discussion going. It might start to get that engagement, but it goes beyond getting a comment and actually shows your readers that you’re willing to help solve their problems as well by actually making it a reader question, rather than just a random question. It showed my other readers that I was interested in helping them. That particular discussion post stimulated a whole heap of other readers sending me their questions as well, and so it became a bit of an ongoing series of discussions that we had.

Another simple thing that we do on Digital Photography School on a weekly basis is to issue our readers a challenge. We name a theme for the week and say, “Go take a photo on this particular theme.” I used to do this on ProBlogger as well. We used to do these writing challenges where I would say, “Everyone write a list post or everyone write an opinion post, and everyone would go, “Why?” and then I would share a link to their post. There’s different ways of getting that type of engagement.

Another thing you can do is to run polls. Put together a survey, but don’t just collect the information from your readers, share it back to your readers. What we often do after we’ve run a poll is we will present the results in a further blog post which shows our readers that we have not only got their information, we’ve not only got their opinion or their experience in the poll, but we’re willing to feed that back to them and interpret that for them. There’s a whole heap of different ways that you can create content that is about engagement and belonging.

On Digital Photography School, we publish 14 posts per week. Two of those posts are usually about engagement. They’re usually about belonging. They’re a challenge, they’re a poll, they’re a discussion of some type. They’re an opinion piece that invites discussion as well. About 10 of our posts per week of what I would call fist pump content, which is what we talked about back in episode 130, these are the useful quick win type pieces of content. The other two pieces of content every week are more shareable types of content.

You can see here what I’ve built in our editorial strategy is we actually build into it every week, content that’s going to get the eyeball, that’s going to take people from giving us their attention to get them more interested (episode 13), and then content that’s going to get engagement. This whole process that I’ve been talking about over the last few episodes, we’ve tried to build into our editorial calendar. I would encourage you to look at the type of content that you’re producing on your blog and to ask yourself the question, “Are you focusing on just one of these areas?”

I know a lot of bloggers who just produce eyeball content. They’re just trying to get attention, but they don’t actually produce the quick wins, or they only produce the engagement. If you seriously want to take your readers on a journey through becoming aware of you, to becoming interested, to becoming subscribed, and then to becoming engaged, you need to create content that takes your readers through that journey on your blog, but also in your social media as well.

Let me also emphasize here again the effectiveness of using personal mediums in this. I’ve touched on this in the series already but one of the beauties I think of using live streaming is that it’s a very engaging experience. Literally 10 minutes before this podcast was recorded, I was on a Facebook live video on my Facebook page. I had 30-40 people ask a question or leave a comment on that. I know from past experience that the people who left a comment on those live streams are much more likely to leave a comment on my blog as well.

There’s something about engaging with someone in a live kind of way using Blab, or Facebook live, or Periscope, or any of these live tools. There’s something about those live interactions that stimulate a lasting engagement with people. Do consider using those. Blab (I think) is a particularly useful way of doing this. It puts you into a real conversations with people. They’re not just typing engagements, they’re actually appearing on the screen with you as well, so you might want to check out Blab for that. I’ll put a link in today’s show notes to a podcast where I talked about Blab as well.

Another thing I encourage you to think about with getting engagement from your readers (and I’ve touched on this one already) is that it’s really important to not only have engagement between you and your reader. It’s not just a one-way or a two-way thing. It’s not just about you and your reader individually. It’s about you and your readers, and your readers and each other. You want to introduce your readers to one another.

I’ve already talked about this in that funeral discussion post. That wasn’t a discussion between me and a reader. That wasn’t me putting a post and a reader commenting and then me commenting on theirs, and that was the only interaction. By having that discussion post, my readers got to know one another. I think this is a really powerful thing. If you can not only make your readers feel like they know you and you know them, but that they know some of your other readers, that’s when the community really takes off. I’ve seen this happen on the number of my blogs to the point where sometimes, I wonder whether my readers like each other more than they like me. That can come to be a little bit weird, but that’s a very powerful thing.

You want to let your readers meet one another and there’s a number of ways that you can do that. Using some of these live streaming tools is one of the ways. I have noticed when I live stream that sometimes my readers leave comments for each other more than they do for me, which again can be a bit disconcerting, but I think it’s a really great thing when they’re answering each other’s questions even before I can answer them in the chat. That’s pretty cool.

Using Twitter chat is another way to do this, having a Twitter hashtag party. I found, we’ve done this a number of times with ProBlogger readers and it’s great. Your readers get a chance to interact with me and you as a blogger, but they also get to see who else is reading ProBlogger, and they get to engage with one another.

There’s also something to be said for real life events and I’ve run a number of tweet ups over the years, and meet ups when I travel in different cities, and having readers come together in those type of meet ups can be very powerful as well.

Certainly running our annual events here in Australia every year. The relationships that form in that event are amazing. I know that strengthens my brand as well, because they met at ProBlogger, these new best friends, or these new people who collaborate with one another. Try and build that into your strategy as well. It’s not just about you knowing all your readers, and them all engaging with you, if you can build in some interaction between your readership, that’s very powerful as well.

One last strategy I want to give you on building engagement with your readers is to use what I call content events. Many of you will remember back in 2005 (long-time readers I guess), I ran a series of blog posts called 31 Days to Build a Better Blog and it was the first time I’d ever done a series of blog posts that went for longer than a week. I announced that I was doing this at the start of a month and I noticed—I’ve told this story many times—that got a lot of subscribers to my blog. It was about building anticipation which is what I talked about in episode 115.

The other thing that happens when I did that first 31 Days to Build a Better Blog is that engagement levels went through the roof as well over that particular month. It was partly because everyone of these 31 blog posts that I wrote was an invitation to do something and to share something. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, everyday people would get a little bit of teaching and then an activity that they could do on their blog. Then, there was an invitation to come back and share what they did.

I think day one was create and […] for your blog. There was another one, write a list post for your blog. People would go away and do these activities, which helped them to implement the teaching I’ve given them, but then they came back and shared the link to what they’ve done, and readers began to engage with one another.

Number one, people were sharing a comment, giving the example of what they did, but then they began to see what other people were doing, and that grew the community as readers began to engage with one another. I did this series three years in a row, turned it into an ebook. Every time I did this event, this month-long event of content, subscriber numbers went up, which was great, but engagement went up as well, and it brought a lot of life into my blog.

What I realized is that by turning content into an event for a defined period of time is a very powerful thing. It generated a lot of traffic, but it built a lot of stickiness on the side. It brought people back again and again every day. This is all part of this whole getting your readers onboard. It’s about training them to show up regularly. It’s about training them to engage with you regularly. It’s about training them to take notice of other people on your site. If you can build an event into your content strategy, then that’s a very powerful thing. There’s something about an event that people respond very well to.

I guess there’s a bit of fear of missing out going on there (FOMO), people would see an event happening, they want to be a part of it, but it’s also something about having a defined start and end that I think people like as well. When you say, “My blog is about this topic,” and it will go on for the next 10 years, there’s no end point there, but if you say, “For this next week, we are going to explore this,” or “We are going to do this together for the next month.” People can take that on. They’re willing to join up for that type of thing rather than just an event that’s just going to go on forever. So, maybe try and build some events into your strategy as well.

I’ve used the example of Vanessa (my wife) numerous times in the past as someone who does little events. She runs events on Instagram every two to three months. Little events where every day for a week, she will nominate a color, a type of print, or a type of fabric that she gets her readers to wear. She’s a fashion blogger, style blogger, and she gets her readers to show a photo of themselves wearing that color or that print everyday for a week and then hashtag their photo.

Every week I see when she does this, traffic goes up, she gets more Instagram likers, and engagement goes through the roof. The first time she did it, I think she had 10 people participate on the first day and on the last day, she had 100. That happened in a week. That kind of engagement level grew. Every time she does it, it grows.

Another really great example of this is someone who does them every couple of months who’s Dan Norris. Dan many of you will be familiar with, he has a blog called WP Curve. He also has written a great book called 7-day Startup. I interviewed Dan a few months ago on the podcast as well.

Dan does 7-day Startup challenges where he creates content every day for seven days, invites people to consume that content through a Facebook group. So you join up, you join his Facebook group, he gives you a piece of content every day (I think the last time he did it, there were live videos using Facebook live), and then he gets his readers to do something, or participants to do something every day for seven days.

By the end of the week, they need to launch something. There’s this intense period of work. This group of people work with one another for seven days, intense period of work to launch something, so there’s an app come at the end. Then at the end of that period, he offers people who joined that Facebook group the opportunity to join his paid program which is an ongoing program for people who are starting things. This is just really great, it’s very simple.

It does take him a lot of work for that particular week, but it’s a very simple way to get people from lurking from passive, who might be aware of his brand, who might be even interested in his brand. He actually takes them through the 7-day process to the point where they’re very engaged with him, and they’re actually buying from him as well in many cases by signing up for his membership site. It’s just another example that you might want to check out.

These are the strategies I’ve got for you today on warming up your readers in this last stage of getting them to engagement. Let me recap. Be the community that you want to have. If you want engagement, be engaging. Number two, help your readers get onboard and design a simple autoresponder sequence that trains people to come back to your site, that gives people quick wins, and that invites relationships. Create content that is stimulating engagement and gives people a sense of belonging. Use personal mediums like video live streaming, in particular. Introduce your readers to one another, let them meet each other. Lastly, use content events.

I’m going to summarize all of that over on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/116. If you haven’t already listened to the last four episodes in this series, I highly encourage you to go back and listen to them. They start at episode 112 and work through up until 113, 114, 115, and now 116.

In the next episode, I’m going to give you a case study of someone who has pretty much implemented all of the strategies that I’ve been talking about and it’s a real life example. You’ll actually see how readers flow from becoming aware of her particular brand, to becoming fully engaged, and becoming buyers of her product. Really step-by-step, we’re going to walk through the system that this particular blogger has built to take readers through that. If you want to get that particular episode please do make sure you subscribe to our newsletter which you’ll find on today’s show notes, or subscribe to us on iTunes.

Thanks so much for listening. If you’ve got a comment you’d like to leave, there’s always the opportunity to do so on our show notes. There’s also an opportunity for you to ask a question using the green audio voice recording button and you might just hear yourself in a future episode of the ProBlogger podcast. Thanks for listening, everyone, and we’ll chat with you in a couple of days time.