A great way to engage your audience is to ask questions about your content. A direct question addressed to the reader gets them thinking and encourages them to respond.
If done skillfully, you can turn every post into a lively conversation, which gives you a great deal of opportunity to interact with your audience and build a relationship.
But what kinds of questions should you ask? Here are some ideas to get you thinking.
- What’s your opinion on this idea: “If we’re not moving forward, we’re going backward.”
- How do you feel about our latest blog post entitled “5 Ways You Can Stop Procrastinating”?
- What would make this post more interesting to read?
- Don’t give up on the classic questions, either. Your readers love it when you ask general questions that get them engaged.
- What’s your favorite type of food? How did you hear about our blog?
The best part is, as a blogger, you don’t have to do the heavy lifting. Your topic does all the work for you. Once you identify what’s of interest to your audience, you can easily find relevant questions to ask.
For example: What are the health benefits of green tea? What are the major causes of cellulite?
Asking your audience questions can be a very effective way to increase blog traffic, leading to potential customers. This is because the questions you ask attract people who have similar interests and concerns as your current audience.
Let’s say that you’re a blogger who deals with cooking and baking. You publish an interesting article about chocolate fudge, which is a favorite among your readers. To help generate more traffic, you ask:
What’s your favorite chocolate fudge recipe? Do you prefer the creamy or the crunchy type of chocolate fudge?
To expand on this idea, you could even identify popular recipes and ask questions related to them.
There are many ways to use this tactic. The key is identifying what matters most to your audience.
Now let’s discuss some other ideas.
1. Ask For Opinions
Ask your social media contacts for their opinion on a controversial issue. You can take a recent news item or some issue where there are differing opinions in your industry (for example, whether or not you should use a certain type of cleaning product
2. Ask How Customers Overcome Common Problems
Take a common problem that your readers face and ask them how they overcome the problem. For example, if your audience consists of bloggers, ask them how they drive traffic to their site or how they design their blog for the best readability.
3. Ask How You’re Doing
You can use social media and your blog as a means of gathering feedback. Ask your customers how you’re doing. Is your content helpful? What would they like to see more of? Did your product solve their problem? What could you do to improve your content, service, or products?
4. Ask Your Readers, “Did you know?”
A good way to share a curious or little-known fact with your audience is to pose it as a question. Ask them whether or not they knew about this and what is their opinion of it? This can spark a discussion based on the topic.
5. Ask For Favorites
A great conversation starter to increase engagement is to ask your readers what is their favorite of something. For example, you might ask your blogger audience, “What’s your favorite plug-in?” Each person will state their favorite, but many will give reasons why and this can lead to discussions and disagreements.
6. Ask about experiences.
Ask your audience about a past experience that stands out in their memory. Choose a specific topic. Ask for a major achievement or a hard lesson your readers learned.
7. As a general rule, ask open-ended questions rather than yes-no questions.
If you ask a yes or no question, you’ll end up with many people simply replying “yes” or “no.” Open-ended questions lead your readers to discuss at length and get more deeply into the topic. You can use surveys and polls for gathering data through yes-no questions.
We hope these tips help you in your quest to become a successful blogger. Remember, we’re here for you every step of the way. If you’ve got questions, head over to zindolabs.com and let us know! We’d love to hear from you!
