How to Get People to Engage With Your Blog Posts

The ideal scenario for every blog owner is to engage your readers and turn them into advocates for your content.

So let’s take a look at just how to engage those readers…

And by engagement, I don’t just mean when people subscribe to your blog or follow you on social media. Let’s be honest that doing that requires very little effort beyond clicking a button. Subscribing and following doesn’t require readers to open up about their own personal experiences so I’d argue that isn’t full engagement.  Full user engagement is when your readers join your conversations by commenting meaningfully or answering a question you pose. It’s something that requires some thought and commitment on the part of the reader.

But just how can you encourage people to participate in your blog community?

Start building the community

In order to get people to engage you need to be engaging – by which I mean investing thought, time and commitment to your blog posts. The internet is full of mediocre blog posts (sorry folks!) and you need to make sure yours are not part of that mediocrity.

For some people this will be easy – either they are great writers or they find putting their thoughts and opinions down in black and white easy to do.

But for many it can be a struggle especially at the beginning. But, trust me, it gets easier with time and it is very rewarding building up a community of like-minded people.

So the most important advice is to fully engage with the readers before expecting them to engage with you.

Of course, it’s easy for me to say that now after 8 years of blogging successfully but some of my earlier blogs really weren’t up to much, but everyone has to start somewhere and that first step is often the hardest.

Being a successful blogger requires significant commitment but if you’re willing to make that commitment then read on for my expert strategies to increase reader engagement.

Use an autoresponder

Using an autoresponder is one of the easiest ways the begin the engagement journey with the people reading and subscribing to your blog. But you can take that to the next level by inviting readers to respond. You can do this with a simple question, such as:

“Why not tell us what your current goals/priorities/concerns/obstacle are right now? How can we help?”

In response you can provide links to blog posts that address the reader’s pain points so people will come back to your blog and read more. This is a great way to start building brand awareness and trust.

Run live events

My final tip for building engagement is to run live events so that your community of readers and followers can get face-to-face. That can either be virtually via live streaming on Zoom, Twitch or another platform of your choice. Or an actual live event.

Take the example of the Magic: The Gathering live events organisers Axion Now Events. BTW for those who don’t know already Magic: The Gathering (or MTG or, simply, Magic) is a complex, challenging and fun trading card game (TCG). Several times a year Axion Now Events organise face-to-face competitions across the UK including CommandFest UK which they organise in partnership with MTG creators Wizards of The Coast. People drive long distances to get to these events and they are hugely popular. There are prizes for the winners and the chance to compete internationally in the World Championships.

Axion Now Events also began Lorcana Fest UK in 2024 – the biggest ever competitive live event in the UK for the Lorcana trading card game developed in 2023 by Ravensburger and Disney. And in 2024 they bring Magic & Lorcana fans together for day-long competitions, quizzes and art as part of their 10th Anniversary Celebration Event.

Leading up to the live events, the engagement on the Axion Now Events website always increases as people want to find out more about the events and buy tickets. So they are creating a series of blog posts designed to engage those people further both before and after the events.

That has meant that instead of just generating more traffic at certain times of the year they are aiming to  bring people back to Axion Now Events even when there are no upcoming live Magic: The Gathering or Lorcana events. Getting people to show up to a website regularly and engage regularly is a great way to build higher engagement

Create engaging content

Another way to engage with your readers is to create engaging content.

You can make every post engaging to a point simply by asking a question at the end (“What is your best tip for finding new readers?”) and encouraging your readers for their answers.

But you can also create content specifically to engage your readers.

One option is to create content in a variety of languages – even though the blog may be mainly in English if English is a second language for many readers they will appreciate occasional posts that are professionally translated into their own language. The important point here is professional translation into another language to ensure familiar terminology is used (which is a problem with auto-translators which simply translate phrases directly). A native translator will also be sensitive to cultural differences which might be important depending on your content ad target audience.

Another option is a discussion post based on a particular question. In these posts you don’t provide the answers. Instead, you ask your readers for their answers..

Another thing you can do is to run polls and surveys. But don’t just collect the information – share it with your readers. We often present the results in another blog post, which shows we not only got the information but are also willing to share and interpret the results.

Do you have any other tips for engaging with your readers, and having them engage with you? Feel free to share them in the comments.