A blog is an important marketing tool. It can effectively drive traffic to your website, or promote products from an affiliate marketing program. Unfortunately, few e-commerce business owners know how to truly use a blog to its ultimate advantage.
If all you have on your blog is post after post of text written as sales letters, then you are missing out on the real point of this marketing tool.
Why Make A Blog Interactive
Quite simply put, the more there is to engage a visitor, the longer they will stay and the more often they will come back. This is the key of effective blogging – driving traffic. With a lot of visitors and a good deal of inbound and outbound links, your blog’s page ranking will increase. It also presents a great opportunity to capture subscribers you can directly market to, and increases the possibility of converting visitors to paying customers.
Ways To Make A Blog Interactive
There are several ways that you add interactive elements to making a more Interactive Blog. These include communication through blog commenting, holding contests, starting a poll or survey, and sharing or bookmarking applications.
First things first. Make adding comments to your blog posts a clear and easy process. Yes, we’ve all been hit by spammers and it is annoying. But making a visitor jump through hoops in order to write a comment is doing the reverse of what a blog is meant to do – and that is promote two-way communication.
Along these same lines, consider writing blog posts that encourage interactivity. Add an open-ended question that asks the reader for an opinion or to post a similar story or experience. This is a great way to compel others to leave a comment and it also creates a sense of community between subscribers. Blogs with plenty of comments also get noticed by search engines and notice can equal plenty of targeted traffic!
Holding an online contest is a very effective way to drive traffic and keep visitors coming back to find out who won. The prize offered for entering a contest needn’t break the bank. It can be as simple as a short e-book or some small promotional item. It doesn’t really matter what you offer; just about everyone wants something for free regardless of cost. You will get the most benefit from a contest by requiring those entering to leave a comment. This gives you a lot of link juice and allows you to capture email addresses for future promotional efforts (with permission of course).
A poll or survey is a great Interactive Blog tool. People love to give their opinion or participate in gathering statistics. Make sure your poll or survey is a short one and offer to share the results with anyone interested. You could include the results on your blog, giving you copy for another post and inviting visitors to return to the site. The best online surveys and polls are related to something topical.
Make It Easy For Visitors To Share Your Blog Content
Viral marketing means that those who enjoy your posts are apt to spread it around the world wide web. This is an extremely valuable form of marketing that costs nothing. Be sure to include a widget or application on your blog that makes it easy for readers to make one simple click and share with others.
An interactive blog will be far more popular and do far more for your internet marketing efforts than one with static posts and closed comments. If you’re blogging just to hear yourself talk, you might not get as far as creating an entertaining and Interactive Blog.
Have a most outstanding day.
Sean RasmussenAussie Internet Marketing
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008 - 2010
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post!
I learned quite a bit from it.
Now, if I can only teach myself how to tweak my own blog- ha, ha.
Right now, it’s the old “trial-n-error” method.
Thanks!
Best,
-K
Kevin
There are many great resources out there.
My suggestion to you would be either Year of the Affiliate or Year of the Blogger. I have both products and they are great
Seems obvious that a blog is a conversation, albeit a one sided one but what do you think of blogs that do not allow comments?
Is that a blog?
Well, it’s a blog without a conversation, I suppose
I personally wouldn’t go to a blog that didn’t allow comments. Makes it essentially a static site. I suppose affiliate sites are what they probably are.
To not allow comments on a blog would be a disadvantage and lessen the chance of Viral marketing, including many other advantages.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a blog that hasn’t allowed comments! Or if I have, I probably thought it was a static website.
Lina
Ones that are more like affiliate sites and straight sales sites. I avoid them
Hello Sean,
I am starting to use open end questions on my blogs, and have noticed a few people starting to comment. I love talking (hey I am a girl) and I also love to interact with other like minded people so using “Tips on Making Your Blog More Interactive” will help me
Cheers
Lisa
Great thinking Lisa. That’s definitely a good start to get people talking
Hi Sean,
I’d love to make my blog more interactive. I think it would help drive more traffic to my site and it would help to lower my bounce rate. I think the key is to try a few different things until you find the things that your readers respond to.
I need to find some things I can give away to try and encourage more participation.
Hi Sean,
I am reading regularly about viral marketing and now I have a better understanding on the meaning of viral marketing and a blog being interactive.
I see now why the importants is there to have an RSS button on my blog and a Twitter button. All Social Media buttons also, I now have a better undstanding of their use. They are there and available to make it easier for my blog to be interective for viral marketing.