The most important difference between a blog and a printed magazine is of course the interactivity. You want your audience, your community, to interact with you and with your content as much as possible. You want people to comment, to spread your content in social media and to engage with you and with each other. So what is the best way to facilitate that interactivity and to keep track yourself of what is going on in social media regarding your blog posts and your brand?
I always use WordPress for blogging, so in this article I will also talk about some plug-ins that are specifically used for WordPress. Over the last years, many people have written about improving the interactivity of a (business) blog. Best practices keep changing however, as new technology comes available and older technology is phased out. Nothing in this article can be considered rocket science, but what I try is to gather the best practices of this moment in one single overview.
1. Welcome readers to your blog
When people visit your blog for the first time, you should try to make them feel welcome and point them straight away to the opportunities to engage with you and to subscribe to new content. What I like best, is to use a plug-in like Referrer Detector or WP Greet Box. Based on how your reader has found your blog, you can greet him with a specific welcome message. Most bloggers use the opportunity to point people to their RSS-feed, but you can also use this functionality to let Facebook’ers know that you also have a Facebook fan page or let LinkedIn’ers know that there’s a LinkedIn group for your brand or blog. When someone visits your blog via Digg, you can ask him to give you a thumbs-up. When a visitor comes in via Twitter, you can ask him to retweet your content. When you know how your readers found you, you also know what they like or what they are looking for!
2. Make your readers subscribe to new content
It should be obvious for readers to recognize how they can subscribe to your stream of new blog posts. There should be a clear call-to-action towards subscribing via the RSS-feed, e-mail or Twitter. Via these three channels, notifications of new articles can be placed automatically. Looking at RSS and e-mail I’d like to advice to not only send notifications, but to include the whole article in your RSS-feed. That makes it as easy as possible for your subscribers to read your content. Many people like to read your content in their e-mail or RSS-aggregator without being forced to click through to your website.
With a plugin like WP To Twitter you can automatically send new articles to your Twitter account. If you want to use Twitter as a notification service for new articles, please be aware that Twitter is not intended to be a next generation RSS-feed. Twitter is build for interaction, so please do not only use Twitter for this purpose but use it also to communicate with your followers. They expect it from you!
The call-to-action should of course be very clear: use understandable and notable icons, make them rather big, place them in a spot where they get all the attention and make sure they can be found on every page of your blog.
3. Give visitors the opportunity to quickly recommend your content
Two very popular and effective ways of recommendation should be available in every blog. The first: Tweetmeme. The second: a Facebook ‘like button’. Especially when people are already signed-in to Twitter or Facebook, these buttons give them the opportunity to share your articles with their friends with only one click.
The Facebook ‘like button’ is quickly taking over the internet. Within a week after the launch, already 50.000 websites worldwide had integrated Facebook ‘like buttons’. And it seems to be a big success: integrating this button in your blogpost can increase referral traffic to your blog as much as 50%. So, having a ‘like button’ on your blog is a no-brainer.
TweetMeme gives readers the chance to retweet your article very quickly and shows in each article how many other people have already done that.You can update the settings so that each retweet automatically starts with ‘RT @yourtwitterID | title-of-your-post | URL-of-your-post’. That way people are not only pointed at your content, but also at your Twitter ID, to which they can connect. With TweetMeme Analytics you’re able to find out exactly how your retweets are travelling over the internet.
Last but not least: don’t forget about the ‘old-fashioned’ way of recommendation: a lot of people still like to use a ’send2friend’ e-mail service. That service should of course by default be available.
4. Add interactive capabilities also to your RSS-feed
Many readers, once they have subscribed to your blog, will never visit your blog again. Once they have subscribed to your RSS-feed through for instance Google Reader, they read all of your content directly from their RSS-aggregator. Especially when your blog is not aimed at generating advertising revenues, this is not a problem at all. It is however highly recommended to make sure that also your RSS-subscribers can engage with your content in one click: commenting and social sharing opportunities should be made available in the RSS-feed itself and not only on your blog. That is the only way to get this group of subscribers to engage with you.
5. Let readers bookmark your content
There are lots of different ways to bookmark interesting websites and blog posts. Your readers probably have all kinds of different services they use to bookmark what they like or what they want to keep for future reference. Various plugins are available for providing readers a convenient way of sharing, but the one I like best is Sexy Bookmarks. It looks great, it support an awful lot of different services, it works great and is highly customizable.
6. Encourage commenting and gather all comments on your blog
Of course you write about interesting topics in a way that triggers a discussion. You pose questions, you make statements. But when you post your content not only on your blog, but also in LinkedIn groups and on a Facebook page for instance, the discussion takes place in different spots at the same time.
I currently use the Disqus comment system plugin on my blog. This system replaces the default commenting engine of WordPress and is used by famous blogs as for instance Mashable.com. Disqus is a third party service, it hosts the comments on their servers, but it is free and has lots of advantages. People that want to comment, can choose to do that as a guest or to register with for instance their Facebook or Twitter account. If they do so, their profile pictures will be used next to their comment. All comments they make, will be linked to their personal profile, which they can claim and personalize or leave anonymous. They also get the option to share their comments on Facebook or Twitter right away.
When people tweet about this post, share it on FriendFeed, post about it on Blogger, Movable Type, TypePad or WordPress blogs, when they link to it from a Flickr comment, comment on the story on Digg or add a comment linking to this post from YouTube, Vimeo or Picasa: everything will appear underneath this blog post. This way it doesn’t really matter where a comment is made, it will always be on this blog.
But Disqus is not the only one. Their are some competitors that offer similar services, each with their own pro’s and con’s. Competiting services to look at: Echo and IntenseDebate.
7. Use rich content in your blog and spread it through social media
Now you have made it to here, you’re probably not one of those people that hates to read long pieces of text. Most people however do, and this blog post is already way too long.
Many people scan articles, pick up the most important messages and look at images and video’s. If available. So therefore you’ll have to open accounts at for instance YouTube, Flickr and Slideshare to host your rich media. Host the stuff there and embed it in your blog. But make sure there are enough hyperlinks back to your blog: both in the content itself as in the metadata it should be clear to who the content belongs. That increases the traffic to your blog and helps the search engines to find your blog.
By working with rich content this way, you’ll reach much more people and make your blog more enjoyable to visit. Each piece of content can be found twice: both on your blog and on the hosting service you use for uploading your video’s, pictures and presentations.
8. Make sure readers can easily contact you
Sometimes people have personal questions or remarks for you. Or, in case of a business blog, they want to find out if they can do business with you. Therefore it should be easy to contact you. The easiest way is of course a contact form, for which you can use the Contact Form 7 plugin. It will just leave you an e-mail when someone fills out the form.
The other way of giving people the opportunity to approach you, is by using Twitter. Therefore it is important to not only push new articles to Twitter, but to regularly log-in to Twitter and setup conversations with the people that are following you. If people reply to you, they expect you to see it!
9. Look further than your own blog
If you start building a blog, you start building a community of people with similar interests that like the topics you write about. When you really want to get to know your community, the best way is to extend it beyond the boundaries of your blog. Start a Facebook fan page or open a LinkedIn group: that’s the ultimate way to really know your readers.
Don’t forget to also look at the ‘competition’. There are probably more blogs out there that cover the same topics as you do. Real competition hardly exists when it comes to blogging. Look at the other blogs, see what they are doing, make yourself stand out, but also think about the advantages of collaboration with these other blogs. Maybe guest posting on each others blogs can help the both of you.
10. Keep track of the statistics and engage!
When your content is spread over various different platforms and when people talk about it in various places, you want to know what’s going on. Therefore you need to have your statistics in place, but even more important: you’ll need to invest time. You need to keep track of the discussions that exist and preferably you also engage in that discussion yourself. You need to know what content is appreciated most, what works and what doesn’t work. And of course: when you want to receive a thumbs-up and incoming traffic from other bloggers, you will need to track the incoming links and do something back for them.
What I personally use in my WordPress blog is the WP Stats Dashboard plugin. It adds so much information to your WordPress dashboard: from your Google Pagerank to your number of Twitter followers and from the number of incoming links to the number of Facebook fans. It shows everything directly after I log-in.
Conclusion
While you do your absolute best to come up with the most interesting, inspiring and appealing content on your blog, your community can do your promotion. Of course, you don’t have to have all your content on your blog: it’s also on YouTube, on Slideshare, on Flickr and other services. From these services there’s always a link that points back to your blog of course, as that is the central hub. People that have found your blog can subscribe to future articles through RSS, e-mail or Twitter. They can also recommend your content to others easily, through Facebook or Twitter for instance. Or they can bookmark it for future reference on various other services, or mail it to a friend. If they are really enthousiastic about your blog, they might become a fan on Facebook on join your LinkedIn group. And when they have questions or remarks, they can comment to the article on your blog. However, if they comment to your article elsewhere on the web, it will also show on your blog. If people want to add some comment on a personal note, they can of course contact you easily through filling out the comment form or replying to you on Twitter.
If you design your blog in a way that offers all this interactive functionality without overwhelming your readers, you have a perfectly interactive blog. And if you take some time once in a while to look at the statistics, to engage in the discussion yourself, to reply on questions and remarks you received and to also comment and write on other blogs, you can grow your business blog to a very successful platform for interacting with your business community.
Photo credit: J Heffner / yoghaert / jekert gwapo / MikeLove
