While it’s every bit as true that a lot of the solutions which are aimed at bloggers are motivated by their producers’ desire to make money out of the whole exercise, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t any of these tools which are of real value. You can probably start to see the value once you use these solutions, such as how you might use Yoast SEO to craft better content which is likely to be ranked higher in the search engines.
You might even use a plug-in to help you connect your Google Analytics account to your WordPress blog for example, which is a very important example because it brings into focus the main topic of this post, which is that of how to keep your blog’s audience engaged. The numbers you see via your Google Analytics account mean absolutely nothing if you don’t know how to interpret them, so that’s the first place you should start.
Learn how to maximise the functionality of all which Google Analytics has to offer you, then you can focus on the meat of the matter, which is how to interpret the data in terms of which of your readers are actively engaged with your blog. It does get slightly technical, but it’s nothing beyond reading the instructions to learn how to integrate code that essentially sets down markers for the monitoring of user behaviours, and then you can put into place some mechanisms which seek to keep your visitors engaged and returning.
Now I’m not going to suggest that you forget everything I said up until this point because that was indeed the technical side of things, but keeping your audience engaged is not about the technical details at all. All of these add-ons, plug-ins, etc just make for a means through which to measure the engagement to a certain degree, naturally making for some tangible metrics you can use to monetise your blog. I.e. sponsors want to see visitor numbers from Google for example, if they are to sponsor you…
So how do you keep your audience engaged? Apart from the bread-and-butter of blog audience engagement retention, which is to produce high-quality, valuable content they actually read, make things a bit interactive for them. Create a poll for example, which would probably have to be pre-loaded with some existing respondent data (you can run the preliminary poll over micro-jobs platforms).
Provide links to some downloads through which your readers can get some more useful info, utilities, freebies, etc. They must take part and feel as if they’re part of the family.
If you really want to retain engagement though you can set up a rolling database of your readers, with their permission of course and then you can periodically send them things. Send a sympathy gift for example, to one of your readers who might have gotten in touch with you and shared their story which would likely be in line with a post you published they can relate to.
In other words, any chance you get to facilitate a unique experience tailored to each of your readers, do it!