Increase Your Small Business Blog Engagement by 288%

Running a small business can be tough, particularly online.

How many times have you been preached to that your business needs to blog in order to survive – and thrive – within Google’s search engines?

If you’ve taken this advice on board and tried blogging for your website, or even hired people (whether part-time, permanent, freelance, outsourced or otherwise) to do your copywriting, you’re missing out on something HUGE.

You may have had a dig around in Google Analytics, or any other analytical software you may use for tracking how many visitors land on your website, and been surprised at how many visitors your blog receives – or how many it doesn’t receive, rather.

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Let’s say you’re really proud of a blog post you’ve written for your website. How many views has it had? How many social shares has it had? If it’s a lot, then I’m genuinely impressed.

However, the reality is that the majority of a website’s blog posts – particularly for small businesses – will go virtually unnoticed.

This is because, despite people preaching about creating great content, writing blog posts is only a small piece of a rather large jigsaw puzzle.

 

How to Get More Views on Your Small Business Blog

I’ve come up with a simple technique that I’ve dubbed Comment Collection, which will increase the views, comments, social shares and links back to your blog articles with just minimal effort.

In fact, using this technique has led to my brand new website receiving a comment for one in every 50 visitors. This is a great figure, although the average is brought down by me responding to each comment I receive.

Better than this, I’m averaging a social share for one in every 5 visitors.

That’s right – one in 5 readers of my blog posts shares, likes, +1s, stumbles or whatevers them on social media.

This is on a brand new website that I started just six weeks ago with zero social following and zero link opportunities to start with. In other words, I started from a completely blank canvas.

I’m about to talk you through the Comment Collection technique, something that has given my website the following statistics:

 

• Increased Avg. Time on Page figure by 288.55% on first article I trialled it on
• Bounce rate dropped by 15.65% on the same post
• Overall Avg. Time on Site figure increased by 92.55%
• Overall website bounce rate dropped by 5.34%

 

 

Increased engagement, social shares, links, returning visitors and more will all lead to increased search engine rankings in the future.

Not only have my web metrics improved, I’ve also increased my email subscriber base and met some great new contacts along the way.

How much time have I invested in using this technique so far? Just a few hours. Seriously.

However, I’m going to invest a significant amount more time to keep my small website community growing – and these impressive figures improving further – using Comment Collection.

The best thing yet? Anyone can do it. Including you.

 

How Comment Collection Works

This is going to so sound so simple. That’s because it is.

Interestingly, you’ll probably find yourself asking “how didn’t I think of this?” or “how didn’t anyone come up with this sooner?”

My honest answer – I don’t know!

This process is so easy and gives great results.

 

Step 1

Firstly, you’re going to need to create a great piece of content. I’m sure you’ve heard all about the need to create amazing content over the past couple of years, so I’m not going to bore you by going into more detail about that.

Let’s say your business is something to do with cars. You, therefore, create an amazing blog piece about cars – all easy so far – something that will intrigue, interest, amuse or invoke emotion from a wide range of people.

Once the piece of great content is finished and live, you can move onto the first stage; finding engaging content. In fact, this process only has three main stages:

 

• Find engaging content
• Find engaged people
• Re-engage people

 

Using Google, or a handy tool I use called BuzzSumo, you should be able to search for “best cars blog” or anything similar – the closer to the content you’ve produced the better.

I recently wrote about my blogging resolutions, so I searched for “blogging resolutions” from the past fortnight to see what other bloggers were saying.

 

 

Within BuzzSumo, you can filter by the amount of social shares that a piece has – the more the better. You can bet that popular social posts have a good few comments on them.

Hopefully, you should be able to find at least 3 or 4 blog posts that have been recently posted that you would consider popular.

That’s it! Stage 1 complete.

 

Step 2

Now, you need to move into the comment sections of these articles.

Who’s commenting? Do they have a website attached with their username? More often than not, users will attach one.

If not, they might have a social media profile attached, another good avenue for you to use.

With stage 2 – finding engaged people – you’re looking to find people that are engaged with content (i.e. commenting) and then hoping to find a way of contacting them; through their website, email address or social media.

 

Step 3

Finally, with stage 3, you simply need to re-engage these people.

How can this be done? I usually find a quick, polite email is more than enough to get the job done. You might want to do a quick bit of research on email outreach if you aren’t otherwise familiar with it, just to make sure you get the best response and results possible.

The best thing about the people that comment – if they like your content, which they should if it’s of high quality – they’re likely to share your piece on social media, subscribe to your email newsletter and also return in the future. Perfect!

With them sharing your content, you’re amplifying the reach of your post to an even greater audience; further expanding your views, shares, comments, email subscribers and more.

 

Reap What You Sow

Sound too good to be true? For once, it actually isn’t. Put in a couple of hours of work and try it out for yourself. 

My aim is to contact at least 50 people to ask for comments for every piece of content I write. You set your own targets – the more you put in, the more you’ll get out.

Related: Ultimate guide to increasing conversions

 

Your Say!

If you have any questions about Comment Collection, I’d love to hear them. Just leave a comment below.