The simplest form of engagement between a blog owner and his readership is actual the fact that people read his content.
The problem is that you can never know exactly if someone came on your blog by mistake or read it until the end or even liked what you wrote or not.
That's why it is important to create opportunities of interaction on your blog related to your content. Those opportunities of interaction can translate better what people feel about what you write.
I can think of several possibilities to interact with a blog editor. From the most engaging to the least engaging (meaning requiring more or less efforts).
- The most engaging (and maybe the most qualitative) are emails you can get from your readers: this require for a reader to find your email on your blog, open a new email, write it and send it. Sounds little, but this is a lot, especially if this readers comes back every day.
- The second form of interaction would be comments or trackbacks. The comments are the conversation taking place out of the content. For me the most interesting part of a blog. Not anonymous (except if commenters wants) but rich in feedback. Requires some registrations and efforts.
- The third form of interaction would be clicks on the hyperlinks featured on your blog and mybloglog can give you a pretty good idea of those links most and less clicked by your readers (other analytics tools too). Does not require any special effort from the reader BUT the data is anonymous and do not really translate the appreciation of the reader
And then you have Blog Ratings
Blog ratings are a very simple and efficient way to get feedback from your readers. It does not require any registration or special effort, just a click on a rating system (usually a 5 stars system that user are familiar with from other sites like netflix or amazon)
From my own observation there is 4 to 6 times more interaction with a blog rating system than any other way of interaction. So this is a good way to collect quality feedback for little effort
There are tones of widgets providing a rating system you can install on your blog. It provides readers also a preview of what other people think about your post. But the real interest is to obtain some smart intelligence around your ratings and provide useful information for your readers to explore the web.
We invested in OutBrain a company that is providing a smart rating system (and actually a lot more you cannot see yet). This is the rating system you can see on this blog at the bottom of each post.
What i like about it is that you can install it in 1 Click and works on most major blog platforms. It is also very discreet and blends well in your blog. It is light and does not affect the load time of your page.
It looks simple but believe me, providing a good scalable rating system is not easy at all.
So why should you use Outbrain rather than a locally installed rating system: because if you don't, you won't benefit from the "network effect" that will provide you a lot of useful features and data to improve the quality of what you write and understand better how users interact with your blog
They started to release some very interesting reporting system that enables you to know over time how your posts are rated and from where (your blog, plug in in the browser). Outbrain is pre-installed on several RSS aggregators (Feedblitz being one of them) and you can get feeback nearly instantly.
You will also know from that report, which posts are rated even if they belong to the past and you cannot check your archives all the time (this happens a lot because of Google....)
Soon there is going to be way more smart data about how people rate your content. And my bet is that if you are a blogger this is a no-brainer vs simple widgets. You offer your readers a useful feature and info (through the rating of others and who are the people like them who liked the post) and at the same time you'll get in return great intelligence on how your content is appreciated.
I forgot to mention that as a reader you get also a personal RSS feed based on your rating history that will provide you some recommendations you should enjoy (this needs fine tuning but will be much better soon)
Don't ask me about the business model: there is clearly one, a great one. But i cannot disclose it for now and it is being discreetly built.
In one word, if you want to increase user interaction add a smart blog rating system now. And if you want to do that, do it here
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