10 Advanced Strategies for Driving Business Blog Engagement

Your blog is a workhorse. Yes infographics and video are extremely popular at the moment, but a well written and informative blog that is consistently updated will never let you down.

You know the stats:

• ·         Websites that include a blog have 434% more indexed pages and 97% more inbound links
• ·         Blogging is the main component of the content strategy for at least 45% of marketers
• ·         Marketers with a healthy blog element to their strategy are 13x more likely to see a positive ROI
• ·         B2B marketers that include blogging receive 67% more leads than their non-blogging peers
• ·         And more

As a business blogger, you’re aware of the basic best practices – keep paragraphs short, use descriptive headers and subheaders, break it up, keep it scannable, use bulleted and numbered lists – and you’re able to optimize for SEO (while avoiding the mistakes).

But what about engagement? You don’t just want visitors. You want engaged visitors. That includes reading your stuff, of course, but more importantly you want them to leave comments, share your posts with their social media networks, link back to your site, and return again and again. You want them to be unable to live without your blog.

1. Understand your audience and what they want

You’ve already identified your target, and hopefully even created a few buyer personas to guide your efforts. But you can do more.

This may not sound like an advanced strategy, but far too many blogs ignore the obvious. You have an industry related to your business, and that’s obviously your umbrella topic. But what specifically is your audience looking for in a blog about your industry? Find out.

Conduct surveys and polls to find the topics that matter. Tools like Qeryz, SurveyMonkey, and Google Forms can help (the last two require leaving your site, while Qeryz functions like a slide box or popup). The best way to find out what they want is to simply ask them.

Or identify their interests using Twitter Analytics. Click on Audience at the top, scroll down, and see the Top Ten interests of your Twitter followers.

2. Build better headlines

If your headline doesn’t pull them in, it doesn’t matter how great the actual post is because no one’s reading it. The headline is the promise, the post is the delivery… don’t FAIL them (you’ll lose credibility each time you do). To paraphrase the Godfather, make them a promise they can’t refuse.

Use keywords, power/emotional words, limit it to roughly 55 characters and 6-8 words, and remember that numbered lists, FOMO, questions, and how-to headlines perform very well.

So spend more time on your headlines, and maybe run your ideas through a Headline Analyzer or Emotional Headline Analyzer for recommendations.

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Author: Aaron Agius