As bloggers, we know that it’s important to have a variety of content to attract all kinds of readers within our blogging niches. We should strive to keep readers interested in what we have to say, while also encouraging them to interact with and respond to our own posts.
By using our blogs to create active discussion within our blogging community, we can stimulate interesting ideas and activity around our blog, which we can also use to generate profit for ourselves as well.
Of course, the way we do this is by create excellent content. If this is something that you feel you need help with, then read onward to see five ideas you can use to enhance your content. All of these ideas are concerned with creating specific content features on your blog, which you readers will come to expect each time they visit your site.
Ask Your Readers
If you already have a solid readership, you can use a snippet question to inspire debate among your readers in the comment section. Essentially, you write a sentence long question that asks your readers to take a side on an issue or share their opinion, and you post it with no commentary.
If your readership is actively engaged in your blog, then you can hope for some nice discussion in the comments section. You may have to take a few months to establish a readership before this method could work fully.
Pillar Article
One way to establish a solid readership is to write several pillar articles on your blog. These should be well-research and lengthy articles on some important issue or process, on which you consider yourself to be an expert. Set up these pillar articles as a feature that consists of you sharing your expert knowledge with the readers in your blogging community.
Depending on the subject matter of you blog, examples of pillar articles could be ‘How To Register a Domain’ or ‘Internet Access is a Basic Right.’ The first example is a ‘how to’ article that will attract readers searching for help, and the second is an opinion article that establishes your basic philosophy, which many readers will find useful to know as they read your blog. In any case, your pillar content should be length and important.
News Update
Another great kind of content is that which provides up-to-the-minute news for you readers, especially news that specifically concerns the blogging community. If you have a good stream of news, or if you have inside information, then you can share that news with your readers. The goal here is to establish yourself as someone in the community who has his or her pulse on trends and the next big thing. This will make you an authority, someone to be trusted, thus enhancing your reputation and traffic.
Link Roundup
This is similar to posting a news update; however, the difference is you offer a handful of links that you found interesting, and these can range from news to other bloggers’ opinions. Because it’s a roundup, you don’t need to offer commentary; instead, your sharing it with your readers and subtly promoting it as something worthy of their attention. This is a great way to brand yourself as a discerning taste-maker. If people find your link roundups interesting, they might stick around your blog to read your other content.
Argumentative Article
Finally, you can post argumentative articles—I don’t mean confrontational—that take an issue within the blogging community and your voice and opinions to that issue. If you do this well, you can start a great discussion on your blog. For ideas, look at recent issues within the blogging community of which you are a part, such as censorship of commenters who are critical of the community or problems with spam filters, and write a well-researched opinion piece that clearly states your position on the matter. Invite other readers to weigh in. Hopefully, you can help lead the community to a solution.
This is a guest post by Katheryn Rivas, a freelance writer and blog junkie, who blogs about online universities. She can be contacted at: katherynrivas87@gmail.com.
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Image Credit: Joseph Robertson
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