How Blog Posts Engage Potential Customers

Over time blogging has transformed to keep up with changing opinions and the way we communicate with one another. In the mid 1990’s when blogs first began circulating the internet they were referred to as personal homepages and barely caught the attention of readers who didn’t know the writer personally. In the two decades that have followed they have broadened their reach and diversified their purpose to the user. A blog post is designed to cultivate a discussion, and like a verbal discussion in real life, the most important driving force behind any blog post is the interest generated by the topic.

Take this blog post for instance; this blog post will focus on ‘How Blog Posts Engage Customers’. If you are someone who is reading a blog, then this topic almost automatically invites you to consider the reason you are reading. The reason people read anything is because they are interested in gaining the information being presented by the topic. They say not to judge a book by its cover, but we all judge a book by the summary on the back cover. It not only acts as an introduction to the larger content available to you, but more importantly, it allows you to spend a minimal amount of time gathering enough information to see if the larger content is worth the larger time investment. For a blog post, that summary on the back cover that helps you decide whether you want to read the book or not is simply the title of blog.

The title of a blog is the only opportunity the writer has to invite the reader to continue engaging with the article. This is why the titles of most blog articles are questions that are posed to invoke an answer from the reader that they will want to compare with the opinions and findings within the blog, or statements that are designed to invoke a similar desire for contrast. Think about the reason behind why people read comments under Facebook or Instagram posts. The idea is that you already have a thought, but you read the other comments to see what other people are thinking about the topic. The title of the blog acts like the picture while the article itself is a collection comments, presented by the writer, that the reader wants to take in because they have already formulated their own thoughts and opinions on the title.

When it comes to blog posts that are tailored to a particular product as opposed to written as an opinionative piece, the importance of the information being communicated is more weighted on the honesty and transparency of the writer. In order to engage a customer, you have to build trust and show a sense of expertise at the same time. So, to bring it all full circle; how would a blog post engage a potential customer?

It would have to begin with a title that tickles the curiosity of the reader and invites them to give more thought to the product or service being promoted by the writer. But how do you know if someone is even reading the article? Well, you can always track the traffic on the website through clicks or views. Although that’s a good way to know if people were there, if you want to truly be engaging with the customers you need a glimpse into their response to the blog in order to be able to gauge whether they’re even buying what you’re selling. A great way to gain insight into whether readers are being converted into customers is to provide a comment section that allows you to gather feedback from people engaging with your blog.

So now you see the comments coming in (and hey, some of them are even positive) but your engagements are still limited to the people reading your blog. What if your website isn’t getting a lot of traffic though? How do you increase the amount of people engaging with your blog? A great way to increase the amount of people engaging with your blog to is to make sure that readers have the ability to share the blog on more popular platforms. Not a lot of people may visit your averagejoe.com website to(or) even get a chance to read your blog but if just one person posts(shares) it to their public Facebook page, then your reach has just expanded exponentially. On top of utilizing social media platforms to expand your reach, there are also multiple ways to utilize search engine optimization strategies to increase the visibility of your website through google searches as a way to increase the likelihood of your blog post popping up when any related topic is being searched.

Now your blog is popping up all over Facebook, Twitter and maybe you even do a voiceover plug of the website through Instagram and YouTube links. How do you know if the blog is effectively engaging customers? Well first you have to consider what makes an engagement effective as far as a customer is concerned and that’s a no brainer: leads generated. A lead is essentially interest generated and acted upon by a customer. The same kind of interest that is generated by the back cover summary of a book that leads the reader to purchase the book or the interest generated by the title of a blog that leads to the reader to read the entire blog post. A lead is interest turned into action and that is how a blog post engages a potential customer. The blog post must turn the interest of the reader into action, and it begins with liking the title and ends ultimately with them sharing the post. But it never actually ends because a good blog is shared over and over again, repeating the cycle of interest and action.