We’ve talked a lot about audience engagement and building a community around your blog throughout this series of articles about blogging for your brand. Today we’ll go over a fun little strategy that involves your audience and gives you plenty of fresh blogging topics and ideas.
You may remember a few weeks ago, I suggested you ask your audience to email you some questions. Today’s tip is along the same lines, but now you’re asking your readers to share their best tips.
Your Audience May Surprise You
Audiences will come up with some interesting ideas. Not all of them are viable for publishing on your blog, but you’ll be pleasantly surprised how many ideas and tips are helpful and make excellent starting points for blog articles.
Ask for Permission
Start by asking your audience for tips. This can be as open-ended or specific as you’d like it to be. You can write up a blog article and frequently share it on social media and via email, or you can write up a quick email that goes out to your subscribers. Just resend it anytime you start to run out of ideas or tips to share.
You can have your audience email you back with their best tip and idea and make it clear that you may use these tips on your blog. I also find it helpful to ask my audience how they would like me to share the tip. Some prefer an anonymous tip, while others are proud to see their full name and link to their own blog on my site.
Most fall somewhere in-between.
Different Ways to Use Their Tips
You have a couple of options for using these tips. The simplest is to copy and paste the tip and the submitters' names in a new blog article. If you’d like to automate this process you can use a plugin like Gravity Forms for WordPress and have readers submit their tips there. You can then either have the plugin publish the tips for you as new blog articles right away or save them in drafts for you so you can review and edit them before publishing.
Another option is to start with the reader tip and add your own two cents as well. This will end in a longer, meatier blog article. Or you could compile several related reader tips and just add your own introduction to the article.
The Rundown
No matter how you use these reader tips, they will help you come up with fresh blog article ideas on a regular basis and they will help your readers feel more engaged and more a part of your community. Give it a try.
