Make It Easy
Firstly the layout needs to be captivating, imaginative, colourful and visually appealing but it also needs to be straight forward in the sense of getting around. The audience isn’t going to want to engage or stay on the page if it proves challenging to navigate or if it takes forever to load content. Ensure your layout is something that would appeal to you and would make you want to click on it yourself. Your blog should be easy to follow and something your readers would want to spend their time looking at, reading and exploring. Don't forget to make sure your content isn't overly complicated. Use interesting words to engage the reader but at the same time don’t use over complicated or unrelated vocabulary that the reader may struggle to understand. This will cause the reader to check out.
Consistency Is Key
It's hugely important in order to create a successful blog that you keep the blog updated regularly with diverse and engaging content. There's no point only doing a blog every few months as the audience will lose interest and not want to return or even just forget about your blog all together! It's also important to keep the content interesting - there's no point posting on your blog 5 times a day with low quality repetitive. Make sure you find that balance between quality and quantity to keep your audience wanting to come back for more.
Feedback Is A Priority
Feedback is a key tool in increasing your blog's engagement. Whether that be through questions within your blog post, through the comments section or through a discussion. It's a key tool in letting you know what's good about your blog and what improvements need to be made. It also gives you ideas of what to blog about next and what the audience wants to know more about. If you use questions as a form of feedback it can also promote conversation or a discussion which can lead to the blog being shared among other social media outlets ultimately increasing your blogs popularity. Don't forget to respond to any feedback you receive whether that be interacting with individual members of your audience or making changes to your blog in any way.
Find The Missing Piece
With so many blogs around it's important your blog stands out and offers something diverse and different. For example if you're blogging about a subject that is widely blogged about its important people want to read about yours and the key to this is finding the missing piece. Firstly look at similar pieces that have been written about that topic and simply look for what hasn’t been covered within the article. Your audience will love the fact that you have covered a well blogged about subject but took a completely different spin on it. This will also help to attract social shares, feedback and comments which will improve your blog's engagement.
Provoke Feeling
Provoking feeling in a blog creates meaning for the reader. For example if your blog has an inspiration piece this creates an emotion of happiness and joy which in turn would leave the reader feeling uplifted. By playing on your audience's emotions you can create a positive emotion that the reader would want to feel again. The layout and images used can also promote feeling by facial expressions on images or colours used on the page. It's important to consider what feeling you want to promote to your readers when creating your blog.
TBP x
