Blogging has evolved to become an instrumental method of conducting business as it can be used as the real-time way in which a business gets recent, relevant, and up-to-date information out to its target audience.

This is why law firms have found that using blogs to focus on and highlight key issues help retain clients and draw in new ones at the same time. 

One challenge in maintaining a successful blog is ensuring engaging interactions to keep the content dynamic.

The fact is, the web got much faster. No one has time anymore to pause and comment on your blog. Everyone has their own feeds where they would rather spend time commenting on friends’ and followers’ updates and interacting.

Getting readers to comment on your blog has become incredibly challenging.

Collaborate with Your Peers

One of the best ways to get more people to comment on your blog is to ask those past readers and peers with whom you have or had a good relationship. 

This can be done by sending DMs and emails and letting them know you’d appreciate some comments from friends about any issue relevant to them. 

This will get comments started, and then you will find that more people post as they tend to follow what others do on a blog.

Don’t just stop there: If your friends and fellows decide to visit your blog and comment, reach out again and invite them to set up a collaboration group (on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, or Slack) where you can all comment on one another’s articles.

This will be useful for everyone involved and will keep interactions coming.

Trying to do everything alone is one of the biggest blogging mistakes. It is incredibly discouraging and limiting. Always look for micro-groups to join and set up your own. We are stronger when we are together!

Ask Questions

Creating content answering popular questions is a great way to invite more answers from readers.

Ask your question in the page title and H1 heading and answer it in the content. This will also likely improve your click-through from organic search results: I’ve found question-type titles are highly clickable.

Keyword research is a great way to find popular questions to answer in your content. Simply run your target keyword and filter your keyword list by a question word (“how,” “why,” “what”). SE Ranking keyword tool is my favorite way to find popular questions for blog content inspiration:

Invite Readers to Comment

One way to promote blog commenting is to pose questions and ask others to comment. Some may think this is a common sense approach; however, those easy-to-implement ideas often get overlooked even though they truly do work. 

Just ask for comments.

Create a clearly visible button, “Comment” to encourage discussions. Many blogs make it very hard to figure out if they even support comments. This will have a domino effect of sorts and trigger more people to chime in, and thus, the commenting per post will generate itself over a short period.

Offer a “Subscribe to New Comments” Option

Getting people to come back and reply to other people’s comments is a great way to keep those conversations going. It is also a huge incentive for readers to comment as they will want to participate in real conversations.

Therefore, make sure to offer your commenters an option to subscribe to new comments for them to get notified when new conversations are being posted. You can do that through a plugin that is easy to install and integrate with native WordPress comments.

Use Viral Content Bee

Viral Content Bee (a platform that I own) has just introduced a new feature allowing users to request comments on their blog posts.

It is a brand-new feature that allows you to easily generate discussions on your blog without reaching out to your friends and peers again. Also, it is free.

Cover Trending Topics

People seem to be much more willing to share their thoughts or reply to other people’s comments when something is trending (see this post about ChatGPT). Therefore covering trending and seasonal content can drive much more engagement (shares and comments).

To make seasonality and trends part of your editorial calendar, keep an eye on Twitter and popular blogs in your niche to be able to create content whenever anything goes hot. Additionally, include seasonality in your editorial calendar. Check with Google Trends to be able to find yearly recurring trends and to be able to time your content better:

Build up Your Email List

Focus on building your email list. Email subscribers tend to be more involved because they already know you and your site, so they are more likely to post comments and foster further interactions with readers.

Email marketing is a wonderful way to stay in touch with your readers for later conversions. Including forms on your blog’s sidebar or below new posts will prompt visitors to subscribe. There are quite a few email marketing platforms allowing you to set up automation and send emails any time you publish a new blog post.

Remember, you need to provide enough value and quality that readers would feel like they’re missing out if they weren’t receiving your regular emails. A standard way to increase subscribers is to provide something of value in exchange like a free guide users can download after they sign up. The most important part about your email list is that you own it.

Conclusion

The key to a great blog is conversation. No wonder a well-commented article is a true blogging triumph for many people. You need people to participate in your blog’s life, contribute fresh ideas, ask and answer questions, etc. It is also highly motivational and will help you never feel a burnout. 

Blog comments motivate writers, help them better understand their audience (and for businesses, help create reader and customer personas), inspire with more content ideas, make your blog pages fresher and encourage search engines to reindex them…

An important note to make here is that you must moderate comments carefully to ensure your readers are not shocked by spam.

Blogging is a truly real-time method of generating interest in your business, building a community and driving traffic and conversions. It is less effective if you use it only for broadcasting your thoughts. Blogging is much more effective when it is an on-going conversation with your target audience!

Get More Engagement from All Your Content Marketing When You Join the Marketing Trailblazers Community

Blog Cover Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

The post Join the Conversation – How to Attract More Comments on Your Blog Posts appeared first on Adventures in Visibility.

Awhile back I asked you and others in my social networks:

What’s your biggest question about creating visibility for your business, on the Web?

I received over 60 questions (to date) and was moved by the frustration so many online entrepreneurs expressed about how to get their message heard and seen in the cacophony of the Web.

11% of the questions were a variation on the question of “how to find your ideal client on social media sites.”

Many people wanted to know how to find “the right audience, fast” or how to “find new people” or how to “build a passionate community.” 

Excellent questions. I want to be clear though, I’m not going to tell you that it’s a fast and easy process to build an audience of your ideal clients. They are not waiting together in a group, hoping you’ll find them. They are not hanging out in one place.

And, once you find them, what do you do?

There are some things you can do to get the ball rolling…

How to Find Your Ideal Client on Social Media

1. Mindset. First and foremost, remember that building your business is an ongoing adventure. It evolves; it morphs; finding and building your audience is an important part of your daily activities. It doesn’t end. For an entrepreneur, author, consultant, coach or other professionals, it means you are always marketing and social networking sites can be the best way for you to reach your target audience.

You (or someone on your behalf) needs to do the work consistently and constantly. You are marketing your business. There is no Fast and Easy Button (sorry!).

2. Research. What do you know about your ideal client? What are their hopes and dreams? What are their biggest obstacles? Do you know where they spend their time online?

With over 2 billion users, you may think they are all on Facebook, but maybe that isn’t true for your specific client.  Knowing the demographics for your ideal client is helpful so you can use a site like Quantcast to check the social networks and find the best match.

The tip in the video below is obvious, yet often overlooked… (I made the video five years ago and it’s just as relevant today)

Once you have a picture of your ideal client and you know where they spend most of their time online, then you can create a strategic plan to reach them.

3. Foundation. Without a foundation for your online presence, anything you do on social networks won’t be well optimized. After all, you are a guest on the social networks – you don’t own or control them. You must have a blog site as your home base so you can move ideal clients from the social network to your online property.

Once your blog site is ready to receive visitors and is optimized to convert ideal visitors to ideal leads, then you move to the social networks. Read the 5 Essential Elements for Your Visibility Plan (about midway through the article).

4. Plan. Haphazard activity on social networks will get you haphazard results.  You’re committed to marketing your business. You’ve done your research and know some demographic details about your ideal audience. Your blog site is optimized. 

What’s your plan? 

Haphazard activity on social networks will get you haphazard results. Click to Tweet

5. Engage. You’ve done your research and you’ve got your foundational pieces ready to receive. Hopefully, you’re not sick to death of the words “engage” and “engagement” because this is the part you absolutely cannot skip if you hope to find and attract the right audience.

Your content is at the heart of it all. The articles you post on your blog and the microcontent you post and share on social networks begin the process of establishing your expertise, your tone, and your passion around your message. This is where most people give up. “It takes too much time” or “I don’t have enough time” are two common complaints. Yet, going back to #1, I invite you to remember this is your business we’re talking about. Do you want it to be successful?

Every single successful entrepreneur I know and observe is passionate about getting their message out. They are committed to doing whatever it takes to create the content aimed at their ideal client so they can eventually serve that client.

Complaining about lack of time indicates that maybe you’re not ready to build a successful business, yet. This may sound harsh to you, but I hear it all the time. You’ve got to be willing to work (mindset) for it and that requires a steady stream content in one form or another.  Not once a month, but every single day.

Content = text, images, video, audio; long and short; live and recorded; original and curated from other peoples’ content (OPC)

If you’re stumped about what content to create, review this infographic from Copyblogger.

Before people flock to your business, you’ve got to go to them and there are hundreds of ways to do that. Start on your blog, then move out to the social networks you’ve identified when you did the demographic research in step #2. More on this in future posts.

Content is just part of the engagement equation. Not only do you have to engage the attention of your audience, you need to engage directly, person to person. Answer their questions. Ask them questions. Share their content. Have a conversation. The more you interact, the faster you move the “know, like and trust” factor forward.

Creating content and interacting with your audience takes time. No way around it. 

If you want “fast” then go straight to video. Video is truly one of the fastest ways to make a connection with your audience.  Audio works well too, so consider launching a podcast and/or show on Facebook Live to accelerate your visibility.

Video is truly one of the fastest ways to make a connection with your audience. Click to Tweet

6. Communities and Groups. In addition to using video to connect, I strongly suggest joining and starting your own community or group on Facebook and/or group on LinkedIn. Of course, this depends on what you discover during the research phase about where your audience is most likely spending their time. 

When you host your own groups you can fine tune your message and invite or open to folks who are interested in a specific topic that is your expertise. For example, I have a group on LinkedIn focused on creating visibility for authors and entrepreneurs. It’s been a great way to meet new people, network, share info, learn new things, and yes, attract new clients. I also host a free group on Facebook for people who sign up for my free 7-Day Visibility Challenge.

7. Invite. As your audience grows, then, it’s natural to start extending invitations to get your freebies, join you on Facebook Live events or webinars, and make offers for your products and services. This can only be successful if you have built relationships by engaging on a regular basis and offered consistent value with your content.

Easy, peasy, right? When you’re in the marketing flow, this will be a constant cycle and you’ll be working on multiple steps at any given time. It becomes natural and your activities will help you find your ideal client over and over again.

Where are you in this system? What steps do you need to add to your daily habits in order to find more of your ideal clients?

Post your comments below or contact me to find out how we can work together to get more visibility so you can find your ideal clients.

Updated on 9/21/17.

Feature Image:  Andrew Ly

The post How to Find Your Ideal Client on Social Media appeared first on Adventures in Visibility.