You Can & Want To Interact With Your Blog Visitors

Add a Blogger Poll

Create a Poll

Polls have many virtues. One virtue is that they allow you to capture information about your visitors that you might otherwise not be able to get. Another virtue is that they prompt involvement on the part of those who feel that their preferences were not well-represented in the poll.

I want you to use polls for the second (and lesser-known) virtue. That is — create a poll that is incomplete — and then allow commenters to chime in by arguing that you should include additional categories and explaining why that is the case.

Tip for blog visitors: Alternatively, you’ll offer a complete list of choices but rather explicitly ask them to comment why they chose it. People will start a discussion on why X is better than Y or the vice- verse.

This should stimulate some interesting comments, which could lead to a discussion between blog readers.

There are blog poll widgets that you can add to your blogs – different installs depending on what format you are using. But, you can easily find what you need just by searching. For WordPress you could check out blog poll widgets.

Give Readers Less Time to Comment

As with many things in life, it’s all too easy to put off blog commenting and tell ourselves that we will do it tomorrow instead. And, not surprisingly, this is something that many would-be commenters do.

They decide to put comments off until later, but when they go to do them at another time, they find a new blog post and lose interest in placing the original comment.

One way to get around this is to put a cap on the amount of replies you allow or the amount of time people have to post replies.

When they see this cap and realize the implications, they will be prompted to post now, rather than later. While it may seem counterintuitive at first, it can work quite well in practice to bring in additional comments.

There are several ways to interact with your readers. The comments section for each post is one way for your readers to interact with you, so make good use of this.

Donna Ward
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