With all the new outlets of information, entertainment, and news coming up on the internet daily, the old fashion blog is still one of the most effective ways to reach the target audience. Blogs are also content marketers’ preferred outlet (if we go by absolute numbers) for reaching the target audience as they help in building a long-lasting relationship with the audiences, create a connection and community, help in answering a lot of quires of the audience, and also helps the audience navigate through your product creating the great user experience.
Whether being a content creator, digital marketer, business owner, or any other hat you wear, knowing how to engage readers on your blog audience is important. Apart from the basics of having perfected typography, optimizing your blog for SEO, and having images, tables, and bullet points to create an easy reading experience for your audience.
Here are the four must-have features your blog must have to create a highly engaging blog.
Comment Section
You know your interest and what you want to communicate with the world. You have your website ready and your first blog post up. Now what? Knowing how your audience likes your blog and their opinions and reactions is important. Having a comment section will allow you to listen to your audience and help you create a community where your audience can interact with you and each other. Most modern content management systems have built-in comment systems.
They allow you to moderate the comments, protecting you from spam and unwanted harsh comments. We definitely recommend using this feature. For advanced functionality, you can look at dedicated comment systems like Disqus. Facebook offers a Facebook Comments product which I great if you are also actively building a community on Facebook.
An audio version of your article (audio-article)
Most people on the internet are already listening to podcasts actively. More than 70% of the online population actively listens to podcasts. Providing an audio version of your blog post or article can help you boost engagement significantly quickly. Listeners listen longer, retain more content, and are more likely to return. Providing an audio version of your article can help your audience listen to your article on the go. It can also help you reach your audiences in multiple languages helping you create a brand voice and personalized experience.
It is easy to add text to speech-generated audio articles with the latest AI Voice Generator. With the technological advancement in artificial intelligence technology, text-to-speech software will help you generate audio articles with human-like voices in multiple languages by just using a plugin or integrating the software into your CMS using APIs. There is text-to-speech software that provides voices in more than 100 languages in numerous voices helping you create a realistic-sounding text-to-speech voiceover for your audio articles. With a simple audio article widget, your articles will be read out loud in the form of realistic sounding AI voices using text-to-speech technology.
Social Share Buttons
Social Share Buttons on your website will allow your audience to share the post you have created on their social media if they like what you posted. In addition to users sharing your post on their social media, it is crucial to share your social media platforms too. Informing your audience about your website’s official social media platforms will create a great interlinking promotional activity helping your audience notify about your new blog posts, updates, and more.
Email Newsletters Facilities
Blogging is an outlet to let people know about your thoughts and opinions. With insightful content and correct SEO, you can gain a huge audience. But it is important for these audiences to come back to your blog. No one has the time to check daily whether there is a new update on the blog.
Creating an email newsletter will help your audience who sign up for your newsletter get notified of the new updates, bringing them back to your blog. In addition to updating your blog via email newsletters, having an email list of the audience interested in your website is a great way to research further, develop, and test what your audience is looking for.
From having a comment section to an option to listening to your article using AI Voice Generator, creating a great user experience with an interactive community is a great way to build your brand.
- Author – Eram A. Shaikh
- Content Marketing Specialist
- Listen2It
