Hi readers. Yesterday I wrote about the deal I found for my grand bebe at Target. Beneath that story about the hard-to-resist deals at #Target Colors is another story about how to build engagement online. Every blogger or multi-level marketer is seeking feedback from their readers. If you cannot capture a reader’s attention you have no possibility of getting them to trust or interact with you. I can tell you about this struggle as well. I will save it for another time.
Some of you have asked how a person makes money online or becomes recognized for their writing. This image of a needle in a haystack captures some of what we as entrepreneurial women are up against when it comes to readers finding us. But this is also the reason I want you to know that I appreciate you reading, commenting and sharing my blog posts. Let me use my shopping trip to Target to explain a couple of strategies that newbie entrepreneurial women can use to up their engagement:
#1 Figure Out Who Your Community Is and Talk to Them
I had a lot of trouble with this. When I started blogging I wrote about things that interested me. I “thought” I was talking to people who also found these things interesting and would find my voice fresh. I wanted to talk to these people who wanted or needed to hear what I was learning. However, as it turned out, these were not the people who were reading what I wrote. Yet for a long time I resisted this truth.
When I finally got around to looking at the metrics and demographics of my readership and tried to find how they’d found me, i.e. what exactly were they looking for when they found me in the haystack, I was floored to learn the topics of their search.
Truth is that most of the time, it is a miss. But do not make the same mistake that I made. Figure this out early in the game. This is really not a “build it and they will come” type thing. It may have been at one point in time. But if you are an entrepreneur, you do not want to waste time like that. Figure out who is commenting, what kind of questions they are asking and talk to them in a way they can understand. That way they will come back regularly and they will share your content. That is the secret sauce, when your readers share your posts.
#2 Help Others
In the blogging community I finally connected with a group of bloggers who are supportive of each other. We do not blog about the same things, necessarily. But many of us are entrepreneurial women and we take our blog(s) very seriously. So as a strategy for increasing engagement, this little group decided to individually write about a shopping trip to #Target where we focused on the Dollar Spot. Now here are two reasons I want to share with all the entrepreneurial boomer women who are either bloggers now or expect to be soon so that you beef up your marketing efforts.
These two ideas come together in this one example.
- Write about topics that are trending- Target runs sales pretty regularly. But when the Dollar Spot sales take place, there are a lot of people searching online to learn what’s on sale, which store has what, etc. If you write about this trending topic, there is a greater likelihood that your blog post will show up in someone’s search, particularly if you hashtag the trending topic in this way: #TargetColors. A search using a hashtag is more likely to bring your post up even if you do not come up tops in the search.
- Collaborate- with others who have a similar interest. This does not mean people you think are like you but who have a similar interest or goal as you. This is big and goes back to my initial problem of trying to talk to people I thought wanted what I had.
Part of the work of an entrepreneurial boomer woman is to find a work-around to any and every challenge or obstacle to success. Online things are rapidly changing.Yet if you have ever thought about using blogging as a means to further your business idea,know that it can be done and will be helped by you finding your true community and by collaborating with them on a trending idea.
Just wondering, do you use collaboration when you work on projects either on or offline?
Leave a Reply