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Running any form of a blog in the modern climate is about competition. Unfortunately, learning to compete with other bloggers is a double-edged sword. It’s healthy to work towards gaining more traffic, but you’ve got to figure out tactics to make sure that you are, underneath it all, competitive. When we are developing any form of blog, it’s about building that all-important relationship with our followers. And whatever your attitudes are towards building a blog that communicates your innermost thoughts or is a gateway to affiliate marketing or promoting some product you believe is going to bring benefits to people’s lives, you’ve got to learn how to retain that competitive edge in terms of the content and the blogs you provide. So with this in mind, what does it take to build a strong connection with readers and a blogging audience?
Encourage Discussion
It’s all about targeting your readers. This means that you’ve got to encourage discussion, either in the comments board or by incorporating other components for you to actively respond to individuals. The most common way is to respond to comments in the thread below any article or video. But if you are starting to develop a blog that is for the purposes of selling a product, you need to figure out another approach to building an extra dimension as far as the relationship with your audience is concerned. One of the common ways to do this now is to incorporate a chatbot. Learning how to add chatbot to your site is a relatively straightforward process, and when you are in the infancy of promoting a product on your blog, it can add an extra way to communicate. But it’s recommended that you only go for this when you can guarantee you are able to respond. A chatbot is there for individuals to put a question 24/7. So ideally, this is an option when you have enough people working for you.
Conversation will always make people feel included. Turning a blog or any type of content into a conversation, where people can share their ideas, makes them feel like they are part of a special relationship. If someone ever comments or reaches out to you, make sure that you thank them and respond in kind. Turning any form of content into a dialogue is about that one-to-one relationship. And you can do this by simply asking for comments or calling for participation at the end of the post. And remember, when you are building these interactions with individuals, you’ve got to take the bad with the good. We’re all more than aware of keyboard warriors and trolls. It means you have to develop a thick skin to deal with these issues. Do what you can to limit your own defensive behaviour because it makes you, and the blog, look bad.
Build Relationships on Other Platforms
You may already see your Instagram posts inspire multiple comments, so you may be thinking about the best approach to target certain people using social media. Everybody’s on social media, and by using the right platform, you will have a gateway to the right audience. But it goes beyond this. By finding other ways to interact with your audience using the channels they hang out on is a simple way to build up familiarity.
But it’s not just about social media. Many of your readers are likely to have blogs of their own. Incorporating your presence on their blogs is a simple way to build up a community. We have to remember this when we are looking to build up our DA score. It is not just about the rankings and authority. Everybody might be obsessively checking their DA score, but it goes back to that age-old idea of networking. If you’ve ever been in a room with other people that are trying to make a name for themselves, you can spot the people who are fake and disingenuous, those people that never look you in the eye when you’re talking to them, but they are always looking to see if there’s someone else that they should be talking to. This is one of the big lessons we all need to learn in the blogosphere. You’ve got to be community-oriented.
When you find the blogs that fit your niche you may naturally gravitate towards each other, and while there’s still healthy competition underneath it all, it pays to be helpful. Work with other bloggers so you can help them, and they can help you. By diversifying your platforms, you naturally begin to cultivate important relationships.
Focusing on Your Personality in Your Content
Blogging is about usually letting our innermost thoughts out. And when we are learning how to find our tone of voice, we may find that there are aspects of our personality that don’t shine through on the content. By learning techniques to find your tone of voice, you are going to stoke the fires within your followers much easier. But this is easier said than done. When you try to find your tone of voice, the one true solution is to write the way you speak. And this isn’t so straightforward, especially when you are hunched over your keyboard, constantly editing yourself in your mind.
When you start to focus on your personality that connects with people, you have to hit the ground running. And one of the best pieces of advice anybody can have, if they’re really trying to create a tone of voice that is suitable to them, is to get voice recognition software. Because there are so many people that sit down and type they find, after a while, they are digging a hole for themselves that they can’t get out of. When they have acquired a certain amount of followers, they have to stick to that tone of voice, or otherwise engage in a rebranding and start all over again. If you’re starting out and you have something to say, using voice dictation software gives you the opportunity to freeflow.
There’s a lot to be said for getting your words onto paper. You can always edit it afterwards for it to make more sense but if you are trying to get unfiltered thoughts out into the blogosphere this is a habit that is certainly worth getting into.
Remember Your Branding
We have to remember that it’s not just about our innermost thoughts, but it’s about the entire package. When we are looking to inspire readers or we are communicating our values and beliefs, it’s all about the image we have built up and cultivated. The tone of voice is one aspect, but you have got to be consistent with the other components in your branding, such as the colours, the elements of your website, and even something like the font. When someone visits our website, we’ve got to provide a consistent aesthetic. There is a time where we are playing with the layout, but if we continue to do this, it will only serve to confuse our audience.
Consistency is essential. And having a little bit of knowledge of how to use customer retention strategies to maintain consistency helps. Think about creating a style guide. This is essential if you begin to hire other people to contribute to your blog. When you have so many individuals contributing to the same content, consistency is essential. It doesn’t have to be detailed, but think about what makes you inherently you. Think about spellings, abbreviations, visuals, and your overall use of words.
In addition to this, you need to focus on the six human needs. This is a concept partly related to the hierarchy of needs. When an individual feels special, by personalizing their experience, they will be more likely to return. As well as this, think about piquing their interests and curiosity by asking them direct questions.
It’s About the Simple Things
In many ways, building a relationship with your audience boils down to the simple things. But when you start to factor in the overriding goal of ranking higher on search engines, this is when people have to be crafty in their techniques. It’s still possible to be a blog that captures the imagination of millions of followers, but it’s about focusing on the basic elements that capture the imagination of an individual. It’s always a good idea to go back to learning about the subtle blend of psychology associated with intriguing an individual. Some people can see through these elements so many times because they are bloggers themselves or they are over-saturated with content.
And let’s face it, we are all at a point where we’ve seen so much clickbait that we can create this stuff in our sleep. If you want to build a relationship with your followers, arguably, it’s about refreshing everything. But that’s not to say that you can’t incorporate marketing techniques to build the stance of your blog. A relationship between a blogger and their followers should be simple and in today’s world of SEO and constant marketing bombardment, we can forget this.