Session: How to Maximize Engagement With Your Audience
Speaker: Srinivas Rao

If you hang out around the blogosphere long enough you’ll hear the words “engagement with your audience” thrown around quite a bit. If you’re wondering what it means or how to create it, you’re not alone.  With the amount of tips and advice available on the web, things can seem overwhelming.  Fortunately, creating and maximizing engagement with your audience  can be boiled down to 4 essential elements.

Content

Content is really the heart of a blog.  Without good content you’re finished before you start. Like almost everything in life the ability to create great content is something you develop over time. My blogging friend Joel Runyon put it wisely when he said “you more or less suck at it for a while and you just suck a little less every single day.” The best habit you can develop in terms of creating good content is to write every single day. You don’t need to publish everything you write and you don’t even have to finish it. You just need to get into the habit of doing it and you will evolve as as a writer. If you can determine the core message of your blog and boil it down to a tagline that will have a big impact on creating a connection with your readers.

Communication

One of the most important things that people tend to forget or take for granted is that a blog is multi-format platform. 95% of communication is non-verbal, yet the the majority of bloggers stick primarily to writing as the only way they communicate with their audience. Given that we have content can be consumed in the forms of writing, audio, and video, in order to maximize engagement it’s important to communicate with your audience using different formats.

Connections

If content is the heart of a blog, then connections are its lifeblood. Underlying all the technology that social media puts at your disposal is people. Therefore relationships play an integral role in the growth of your blog. The right relationships cause your content to spread and result in opportunity.  The key to build relationships is to give more than you take, and leave people better than when you found them. There’s tremendous power in connecting purely for the sake of connecting with no end result in mind.

Creativity

Blogging is really an art form and we are all artists. It’s the opportunity to tap into the creative potential that we all possess. One of the great gifts we have at our disposal as bloggers is the ability to experiment with anything and everything. If you have an idea which doesn’t seem to have a purpose, then follow through on it. You never know where it will take you or how it will influence your audience. Take chances with your content and don’t remember that anything worth doing requires the courage to fail.

Hear what else Srinivas has to say:

Srinivas Rao is the author of The Skool of Life and the host-cofounder of BlogcastFM. Download his FREE webinar on the the 7 pillars of Blog Traffic.