Keep Them Coming Back: 5 Ways to Re-Engage With Your Audience

Has your love for travel inspired you to start a blog? Do you feel your travel experience and knowledge of the world could benefit the public?

How many of you have written a post, published it, and have been immediately inundated with a flood of traffic? Not many, am I right?

You know you’re a great writer, but why aren’t the people reading? You’re starting to question yourself and the quality of your work as you realize running a successful blog isn’t as easy as you thought.

The role of writer, as important as it is, is only one of the many hats a successful blogger must wear. A blogger must not only know how to write, they must also assume the role of the marketing department, sales department, communications, customer relations, and data analyst in order to re-engage with their audience.

If you’ve had your blog for any stretch of time, then you know how hard it is to think of content topics each week, let alone figuring out how out how to attract new visitors to your site.

One of the golden rules of blogging involves keeping your followers happy, turning them into loyal readers who’ll want to return again and again.

A successful blogger knows to focus on creating a community who view their site, and their writing, as a valuable resource they’ll regularly engage with.

So, exactly how do you go about encouraging this engagement? Glad you asked.

Below you will find a comprehensive list of tested strategies that have already helped many successful bloggers engage, and re-engage, with their readers. Applying these ideas is guaranteed to bring you results and help you create the travel blog you’ve always wanted.

• Engaging Content

So, what is engaging content?

Your content should be something that readers will find valuable. To create engaging content you’ll want to focus on being:

• Educational
• Entertaining

Creating educational content is extremely important when attracting readers to your site.

If you think about the different terms you and your friends punch into Google’s search engine each day, it would be safe to assume that the majority of searches begin with words like:

“How to…”

“Where can I…”

“The best…”

“The best way to…”

What this tells us is that, besides funny cat videos, people are using the Internet to discover tips, tricks, hacks and the answers to their questions.

With this in mind, you’ll need to first know what your reader’s questions are, and then aim answer them. This will help your ideal readers discover you and position your blog as a valuable resource.

Now, not only should your content be educational, it should also be entertaining.

Generally, if 10 people click on the link to one of your blog posts, only two will ever read it to the end — and that’s if you’re lucky.

Encourage your visitors to finish what they start by making the articles both entertaining and easy to digest.

Be you in your writing, and let your character shine through. Your readers will appreciate it, as a warm personal tone attracts more love than a cold corporate diatribe ever could.

• Create a Community to Engage and Re-Engage with Your Audience

After you create educational and entertaining content, you’ll want to allow your readers to share the content and interact with you and the other readers.

To do this, you’ll want to add buttons that will allow your readers to easily share your posts to their social media pages. This will provide your blog with social proof and aid in extending the potential audience reach for each post.

Next, you’ll want to allow comments on you blog so that your readers can ask questions or post their opinions on the content. The more you allow your readers to interact with each other, the more a community will build amongst them.

Make sure you read the comments, answer and follow up any queries that your readers have. This will help build a connection between you and your readers that they cannot find with other writers using traditional printed media.

• Take the Legwork Away From Your Readers

People really value convenience.

Take the legwork away from your readers and by bringing your blog to them. Collecting emails is a great way to keep in touch with your followers and sending them the latest updates from your blog.

• Think of Your Blog as a Resource

To entice your readers to subscribe to your blog, think about creating free gifts for them. This has been proven on many blogs and other websites to make the exchanging of mail address details much more alluring.

Think what would be valuable to your reader and go from there. Ideas for email opt in gifts include:

• eBooks
• Guides
• Whitepapers
• Checklists
• “How to” videos
• and more!

Another resource you could provide your readers can be the provision of helpful services. Affiliate marketing with businesses that provide services related to your love for travel can be of value to your customers.

Offering discount codes for products and services will encourage visitors to come back to your site to find any new deals they can get their hands on.

Chatbots, like Waylo’s hotel booking AI, are a great tool for engaging readers on page. Having this chatbot on your site provides your readers with a valuable service, and you with a nice source of income.

When people book their accommodation using the Waylo chatbot on your blog, they save a minimum of 10% on hotels compared to other sites like Expedia or Booking.com. The savings gained, from an easy to use chat technology, will encourage repeat visits back to your site and position your blog as a valuable resource.

• The Layout of Your Site

Believe it or not Google actually ranks you on the crawlability of your site. In laymen’s terms this is how easily a visitor to your site can find their way to each and every page.

To help boost your blog’s crawlability, try adding links to the latest posts in the side bar of your blog. Also, adding links to related articles will improve your site’s crawlability and encourage visitors to read and engage more with your blog.

For example, if your latest post focuses on the top 10 hotels in the London area, you may want to add links to other posts in your blog that relate to restaurants, dining and sites to see in the London area.

Your site’s ease of use isn’t just important for Google, it’s important for your readers too. If your blogs layout is a bit of a mess, hard to navigate or full of irrelevant material and ads, users will be less likely to come back and more likely to search for a more user friendly site elsewhere.

To keep your layout simple minimise the use of redundant images, repetitive text, dead end pages or excess third party banner ads.