239: 3 Principles of Building an Engaged Blog Audience

How to Develop an Engaged Blog Audience In today’s episode I want to talk about building engagement on your blog, and building a sense of community around it and your online business. Building engagement is so important for your blog. It helps word-of-mouth growth, gives you energy, builds social proof on your site, and leads to more effective monetization. When people see engagement, they want to stick around and spend money. Three ways to build engagement with your audience Show up predictably - You need to show up regularly. Show up mentally - Be prepared and ready to engage. Show up randomly - Adding an element of surprise can make a massive difference to people. Links and Resources for Principles of Building an Engaged Blog Audience: Bob  Burg Tom Shefchunas Further Listening About Why You Should Build Community on Your Blog Why You Should Make Building Community a Priority in Your Blogging How to Build a Culture of Community on Your Blog Courses ProBlogger Pro – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog ProBlogger’s Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there and welcome to episode 239 of the ProBlogger podcast. I can’t believe I got to 239, to be honest. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, series of ebooks, and courses designed to help you as a blogger to grow your blog, to create great content, to build engagement around your blog which is what we’re talking about today, and to build profit around that blog as well. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger at problogger.com. Today’s podcast is brought to you by our brand new course, 31 Days to Build a Better Blog which launches this week to some of you. This is a course that’s built upon our bestselling ebook by the same name. It’s been completely updated for today and contains 31 days of teaching, more importantly, 31 activities that you can do to improve your blog. You can head over to problogger.com/31days to register your interest in the course. If you’re lucky, you might just see the page is live now. We’re going to open it up to 50 users at a time to beta test it and we’re going to do that with a bit of a discount. To be involved in that beta test, head over to problogger.com/31days. We will invite 50 at a time and gradually over time we will get more and more people in there as we get people’s feedback. Hopefully, over the next couple of weeks it’ll be live for everyone. 31 Days to Build a Better Blog launching in the next week or so, depending on how early you get on that list. In today’s episode, I want to talk about building engagement on your blog, building a sense of community around your blog and your online business. If that is something that is a goal for you, tune in for the next 5 or 10 minutes. It’s a relatively short one today. You can also check out the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/239. Building engagement is such an important part of building a profitable blog. If you’ve been listening to ProBlogger for a while now, you do know that it’s one of the pillars of ProBlogging that I talk about. Those four pillars, creating great content is the first one. Number two is driving traffic to your blog which is something you need to actually participate in. It doesn’t just happen. You need to be proactive about it. Number three is to build engagement, to build community so that the traffic that comes actually feels engaged. Then, the fourth pillar is monetization. These idea of building community or building engagement with your readers is so important. For me, it really brings everything alive. As bloggers, we often focus upon getting more readers to our blog. We want more traffic, we want more eyeballs. That’s important because we do need to build awareness ...