We’ve talked a lot about reader engagement and building a community around your blog throughout this series of posts about blogging. Today we’ll go over a fun little strategy that involves your readers and gives you plenty of fresh blogging topics and ideas.
You may remember a few weeks ago, I suggested you ask your readers to email you their questions [LINK to that post]. Today’s tip is along the same lines, but now you’re asking your readers to share their best tips.
Readers 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 posts.
Start by asking your readers for tips. This can be as open ended or specific as you’d like it to be. You can write up a blog post 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 readers 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 readers 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.
You have a couple of options about using these tips. The simplest is to copy and paste the tip and the submitters name in a new blog post. 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 posts right away, or save them in drafts for you so you can review and edit before publishing.
Another option is to start with the reader tip and add your own two cents as well. This will end in a loner, meatier blog post. Or you could compile several related reader tips and just add your own introduction in the post.
No matter how you use these reader tips, they will help you come up with fresh blog post 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.
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