The DelCor Connection Blog

How to Attract and Engage Blog Readers

You’ve come a long way. You convinced leadership that a blog is an effective strategic tool to achieve organizational goals; you overcame a slew of organization barriers and challenges; and you recruited bloggers and have a full pipeline of content. There’s just one more thing to cover in the last in our series of posts from DelCor’s Progress U. – Blogger Summit: let’s get some loyal readers!

Blog bot bait

We humans like well-written interesting content. Search engine bots are less discriminate; they’re obsessed with keywords. A blog has to keep both humans and bots satisfied: readers who subscribe to your blog and share its posts, and bots that push your Google ranking higher and drive more readers your way.

Ray van Hilst, who writes frequently about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for associations, shared a few tips from the National Wildlife Federation (NWF).

• Bots search tags for keywords, so use multiple tags in all your posts.
• Identify the phrases people use to search for your content. NWF uses both “climate change” and “global warming” in their posts to capture traffic from both searches.
• Blogs that publish more frequently rank higher than those that don’t.
• Write frequently about your organization’s work on specific issues to rank higher on those searches.

Encourage sharing

Before Twitter became popular, ASAE’s Acronym blog had more comments. Twitter might have drawn people away from commenting, but it’s been a great platform for promoting and sharing posts. Acronym’s Joe Rominiecki now keeps an eye on two conversations – Twitter and Acronym comments – to get feedback and engage with readers.

Add built-in sharing tools to your blog so readers can email or share posts on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus+, and other platforms. Ray says, “44% of online sharing is done on Facebook. The more Likes and Tweets you get, the more your readership will go up.”

To cultivate regular readers, add subscription options – both RSS and email delivery. NWF also puts RSS feeds on every tag so readers can select subscriptions by topic.

Maddie Grant adheres to the 90/10 rule of blog promotion on social media platforms: post 90% of the time about other blogs and 10% about your own. Shelly Alcorn recommends cultivating relationships with other bloggers in your community and sharing their posts.

It’s even possible for blog posts to lead to traditional media exposure. One of NWF’s posts had only 20 hits, but a staffer leveraged it to get a guest spot on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show. NWF also uses Twitter to pique journalists’ interest in upcoming posts.

“Publish, promote, and repeat,” says Ray. NWF bloggers announce their posts to other staff around the country on Yammer, their private Twitter-like platform. The social media staff takes it from there, sharing posts with the world.

What if someone says something bad?

Blogs are social media because they’re conversational. If you plan to engage your readers by allowing them to comment, install a spam filter.

Nervous organizations prefer to review and approve comments before publishing them, but that hinders conversation. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association requires approval only for first-time commenters, says Maggie McGary.

Other organizations allow comments to appear automatically and then delete the ones that don’t adhere to blog guidelines. Use your social media policy as a guide to address controversial comments. Lisa Junker says, “It’s not worth worrying about. In five years, Acronym had only one borderline comment.”

Engage your readers

“Always reply to comments,” says Lisa. In the early days she even sent thank you emails to new commenters.

Twitter is a good place to promote comments and prompt readers to revisit a post. People who comment and share your posts are volunteer advocates, Lisa says. “If people are talking about a post on Twitter and not on the blog, that’s fine, engage them there.” An RSS feed for comments will keep readers aware of new conversations.

NWF engages readers by embedding political action alerts into some posts. 31% of their web-based political action now comes from the blog.

Measuring engagement

Blogs are a low-budget item with one exception – time. How do you know if your blog is worth the time? Dave Sabol says “time spent on site” and “returning visitors” are meaningful metrics from Google Analytics. Bloggers also track the number of comments, reader emails, use of sharing tools, and mentions on other blogs and in Tweets.

Here’s the real measure of success: How well is your blog helping your organization meet its goals? Is it making a difference in the lives of your members and constituents?

Flickr photo by alicejamieson

How to Electrify Bloggers & Keep Your Content Pipeline Full

Too many organizations say they can’t have a blog because they’d never have enough bloggers or content. At DelCor’s Progress U. – Blogger Summit we heard plenty of solutions to those problems.

The hunt for writers

You already have writers on staff – they just don’t know it! They’re the ones who create handouts, informational emails, newsletter items, talking points, and reports. If they like to write, they’re good candidates for blogging.

Look for colleagues who communicate well in meetings and conferences. If writing isn’t their forte, perhaps they’re potential blog video stars. Or maybe they’ll make a great interview subject.

Who has stories to share about members, programs, and issues? Who knows what’s going on in your members’ worlds? The resources are right at your fingertips.

A year ago, the National Wildlife Federation had only 4 bloggers. Now, after searching for staff from headquarters and regional offices who had stories to share, they have 179 bloggers.

Young staffers are good prospects because they’ve grown up accustomed to online expression. Ray van Hilst encourages them to blog as a way to find their professional voices and stand out at work. Lisa Junker told her Acronym recruits that blogging will help build their careers, as well as their Google presence.

What if the CEO wants a blog presence but doesn’t want to write? Is ghostwriting a bad idea? Speeches are written for CEOs – why not posts?

Many CEOs don’t yet understand the value of developing relationships and building trust with readers, so blogging isn’t a priority. A PUBS attendee found a compromise: she ghostwrites for her CEO and the CEO replies to comments.

The blogger voice and mind

Bloggers express themselves on behalf of an organization; they don’t just post information. They write with a conversational, personal voice, not an institutional, press release voice. Acronym asks their bloggers to be human and opinionated, share stories from their professional lives, and respond to comments. Be a real person – be interesting!

Bloggers develop habits to generate ideas: they keep ears and eyes open for new ideas, capture ideas as they occur, repurpose content, and keep on the look-out for new sources and voices.

There’s no single way to collect ideas and inspirations. Maybe your best ideas come to you while you’re singing in the shower! Do what works for you.

Boosting blogger morale

When asked to contribute blog posts, the usual response is “I don’t have time.” People are afraid to commit. Who can blame them?

Ask for a small commitment, one post a month. Or two paragraphs – people can be intimidated if they don’t have a way to gauge your expectations. Suggest some ideas or show them how to find ideas. Talk up the benefits of blogging – both the personal and professional variety.

When you don’t already have a public online presence, it’s scary to put your work out into the blogosphere where others can judge and criticize you. Pair up bloggers to review each other’s work, provide support, help moderate comments, and rally the troops if things get ugly.

Be our guest! Be our guest! Put your writing to the test!

To create more engagement between members, supplement staff bloggers with member bloggers. Joe Rominiecki from ASAE’s Acronym blog says a pool of regular guest bloggers saves time because you don’t have to solicit each individual post.

Recruiting guest bloggers is more difficult now than when Acronym launched in 2006. Many members now have their own blogs or are “scratching that itch” with Twitter. Plus, commitment is difficult when associations are short-staffed due to the recession.

PUBS participants suggested 4 ways to recruit guest bloggers.

1. Ask members who already have blogs. Consider cross-posting where appropriate.
2. As a “gateway” to regular blogging, ask members to live-blog a conference session or to contribute a post during a theme week or month.
3. Find new voices on listservs, in online communities, at conferences, or in niche groups.
4. “Speaker stalking is a good way to find guest bloggers,” adds Ray.

Filling the content pipeline

Even if you have enough writers, “blogs go through content cycles, sometimes you’ll struggle with content,” says Lisa, “don’t despair.”

Maddie Grant publishes daily at Socialfish but doesn’t write a post every day. She also publishes guest posts, curated posts, videos, and links to good finds. At the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association blog, Maggie McGary publishes mostly posts from member blogs: promotion for them and a constant stream of content for ASHA.

Here are some more great tips for finding content.

• Set aside time to read and think.
• Find inspiration in industry reports or from the blogs of other industries.
• Turn a PowerPoint into a post.
• Imagine what new professionals would ask.
• Repurpose content.
• Recap conference sessions and share conference photos.
• Share a selection of posts by other community bloggers, as in Acronym’s Quick Clicks. Curated posts help readers find good content amidst all the noise. Acronym also uses Quick Clicks to highlight and encourage new bloggers. 

In our next (and last) post to come out of Progress U. – Blogger Summit, we’ll discuss ideas for attracting and engaging readers. In the meantime, how do you keep your blogs and bloggers active? Where do you find your “electricity”?