4 Tips To Build and Engage Your Audience

Do you know what does it needs to create a successful blog?
The honest truth is : It takes a lot. While “content is king” is  an old rule, it takes much more than good writing to create content that encourages and increases audience engagement.
Anyone who spend hours  over a carefully worded post or conducted extensive research to back up their points, only to be greeted with cricket sounds after they hit the publish button, can attest to this. Appealing content requires more than just writing to attract audience and build a sound audience engagement.

How do we, as content creators, avoid sending our hard work and beautifully crafted content out to an audience who fails to respond? How can we increase our audience engagement?
Start with these 4 ways to promote and foster discussion, social sharing, and conversations around your writing:

 1. Valuable Contents

If you are not sure where to start with your blog content? Just follow one, simple rule: Help other people.
You can do this by creating valuable content. Valuable content is anything that makes a positive impact in someone else’s life.
This is a list of actionable tips, an ebook that explains a complicated subject in an easy-to-understand way, or a podcast that features uplifting messages of hope for those who need to hear it.
Valuable content can be anything so long as it helps your audience. That makes it difficult to define because it depends what type of contents you are posting and what kind of reader you have. Some tips regarding  valuable contents are:

• Provides something useful or functional for readers. It shows them how to do something or suggests an answer to a question.
• Offers insights that readers can apply to their own lives for clarity or solutions to problems.
• Compels a reader through a strong, unique and genuine voice.
• Speaks directly to a specific person.
• Demonstrates the writer is an authority in their niche.

And on the opposite side, you must know that  valuable content is not:

• Common information that anyone with access to Google could find on their own.
• Tips/ Posts that only repeat what another well-known authority in your niche says

 2. Know Your Readers

Yes, it is your blog, your business, your website. But that means nothing without an audience supporting you.
This is a difficult concept for many bloggers. By knowing your reader, you will be able to produce what is required and get a sound audience engagement.
Your content must respect who they are, what they req, and the stories and ideas they want to talk about, read and share.

Knowing and serving your reader does not mean you avoid writing in your own voice or from your own perspective. These are both key elements to creating a successful piece of content that people appreciate.
Said another way, your copy should be true to who you are (or what your site/business is) without always being all about you.
Do not stop sharing your experiences, stories, ideas, and thoughts. These lend personality and spark to your content, but package them correctly and deliver them in a way that is meaningful for your reader.

3. Create Content Worth Sharing

You must be wondering "is this some secret ?". And I get it — this does sound painfully obvious, doesn’t it? But it is much easier said in theory than done in practice.
With more and more individuals and businesses entering the blogsphere, “good” content is no longer good enough. Your content must be able to:

• Provoke thoughtful questions.
• Encourage interested discussion.
• Provide intense happiness.
• Offer solutions to complicated problems.

The things you produce must invoke an emotional response within the members of your audience if you want to see them take the action required to engage with you and your blog.
That’s the biggest difference between good content and engaging content. Your audience may enjoy good content. It may leave them with a smile or have them nodding along in agreement.
Engaging content, on the other hand, illicit a response. Your audience won’t be able to help themselves; they’ll feel so strongly one way or another about your writing that they’ll be encouraged to take the time and effort to formulate a reply. Or they’ll feel compelled to make sure other people see what they’ve seen. Or they’ll quickly sign up for your email newsletter because your message resonated on a deep level.

 4. Make Reading and Sharing Easy for Your Audience

Your audience may love to connect with you, share your content and jump into the conversation. But they won’t do any of the above if you make it difficult for them to do so.
Spending too much time on the content creation side of things makes it easy to forget what life is like on the content consumption side. Avoid this pitfall by empathizing with your audience. Understand what they see as visitors to your site, and make their user experience seamless and hassle-free.
Don’t worry. It is not difficult to work on this aspect at your end. After all, there’s a plugin for that.
Yes,
Seriously. There’s a simple plugin for every step of the engagement process.
Instead of trying to squeeze readers into a sales funnel they’re not ready to join by making them uncheck boxes that would automatically sign them up for emails they don’t want, use a non-obtrusive email address collection plugin.
Instead of requiring your readers to prove they aren’t evil robots by forcing them to enter Captcha codes, use an anti-spam plugin to catch questionable comments.
Instead of expecting them to jump from your post to their favorite social media sites, use a plugin that allows for social sharing right at the bottom of the text.

 If you are using blogger platform then much check following links for Blogger widgets
 1. Decent email subscription widget for blogger
 2. Remove spam comments automatically in Blogger
 3. Handy widgets for social shares, email subscription and posts for blogger

A user frustrated by pop-ups, sneaky email sign-up tactics, complicated comment forms, and lack of direction on where and how they can share the post that they liked so much is a user who won’t engage with you. They won’t comment on your material if they don’t know how, and they certainly won’t go the extra mile of sharing what you say with their own circles.

If you’ve already offered valuable, interesting content that serves your reader, don’t trip yourself up right here at the end. Finish strong and encourage audience engagement by making it easy, simple, and intuitive for those who want to join in on the community you want to foster.