My viewing figures have gone down. No one is buying my books at the moment. Who wants to start a new business at a time like this? Well, here are five pointers to driving and increasing (or maybe, at the moment, maintaining) engagement with your blog. And here I am doing number five right now …
5. Publish more blog posts
The search engines like you to have regularly updated content, to make sure they’re not sending people to an out-of-date source of information. I find the sweet spot comes at around three posts per week. They don’t have to be long. Try mixing things up with different subjects or types of article.
4. Share useful information
One of the most-viewed of my blog posts is still one I wrote as a note for myself in 2011 on how to sort out a problem with Word. Still gets those hits, even now – and thank you comments.
3. Seek engagement
Ask questions. Put those share buttons on your blog (here’s how to do that in WordPress) and ask people to share if they found it useful.
2. Add Like buttons to comments on your posts
I love this feature of WordPress (and here’s how to do it) – if you Like as well as reply to comments, your reader will be alerted and should get a good feeling about you. If you don’t have time to reply right away, a Like will let them know you’ve read and appreciated their comment.
1. Reply to comments on your blog posts
I read a lot of blogs. If I put a comment on a blog post and the original commentator doesn’t respond to it, I feel ignored. I’ve talked about this at length on posts about reciprocity in social media (including blogs). I really try to reply to comments on my blogs within 24 hours; if I can’t do it quickly, at least I’ll “Like” the comment. Personally, if I read and comment on a blog and never get any acknowledgement, first I’ll stop commenting, then I’ll be less likely to read it. So I assume other people are like me and will do the same. Of course there are reasons why people can’t reply to blog comments temporarily, or don’t see some of them, but if it’s a constant feature, lots of comments with no replies, I’ll tend to lose interest.
I hope these ideas have been useful to you and help you to drive more engagement on your own blogs!
LibroEditing proofreading, editing, transcription, localisation 
Jay Colby
June 29, 2016 at 10:45 am
Great tips!
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Liz Dexter
June 29, 2016 at 11:41 am
Thank you!
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Nordie
June 29, 2016 at 11:36 am
I find that mixing review posts with general text posts (e.g. “Spring Cleaning of my bookshelves”) tends to help out.
I also use twitter to remind people about older posts they may have forgotten about – such as ones with high numbers of comments, or with a surge in pageviews (which may indicate there’s something to tap into).
Share it with people you think will be interested:
If I have a post that i think will tie into an ongoing trend (e.g. #readdivers2016,) I make sure that the tag is included in at least one tweet.
My “free text” posts generally go up on a sunday (there’s that regularity mentioned above!), and I share it on Facebook in a “Sunday Salon” group. I have linked to groups elsewhere on Facebook, but cant say I get much response (possibly cos I’m not as active as I should be)
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Liz Dexter
June 29, 2016 at 11:45 am
Thank you for your comment, I think all sorts of blogs have different audiences for different things, so it’s good to tap into them, and those reminders and shares are also very useful.
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Eva Blaskovic
June 29, 2016 at 7:45 pm
Thank you, Liz. Great tips and a timely post for many authors.
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Liz Dexter
June 30, 2016 at 5:19 am
Thank you, Eva!
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Minelli Eustacio
June 30, 2016 at 3:15 am
Lots of helpful tips here, thank you! 🙂 I definitely need to work on more frequent posts; I was doing well for a while but went on holiday and have been finding it hard to thinking up posts.
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Liz Dexter
June 30, 2016 at 5:19 am
Thank you for your comment. My top tip for thinking up posts is to look at your statistics – I see you’re on WordPress, so you can look at your stats and see a) what kind of posts people read most and b) what search terms people use, and use that to help you get ideas for writing about stuff people really want to read about. Good luck!
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ravingreader
July 1, 2016 at 9:35 pm
Thanks for the useful tips here. I agree that one of the easy ways is to vary yr blog content. People tend to like a peak into other people’s lives sometimes, nosy parkers that humans are. ☺️ Thanks again. I’m off to write something non-book review right now….
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Liz Dexter
July 2, 2016 at 6:04 am
Yes, indeed – pictures of my bookshelves are always popular, for example!
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