Three Tips for Community Building on your Blog
A successful blog is built on a series of vital elements, two of which are closely related: (1) a community of readers and commenters, and (2) user-generated content (UGC). The two are intertwined; an active community will foster more user-generated content, and more UGC will encourage new readers to join the community. So how do you go about developing a community? How do you set up the conditions that will foster a community for healthy debate and great content? Let’s take a look at a few great – and closely related – tips for building a community.
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Promote Reader Engagement
You want to encourage your readers to engage with your blog, and with each other. The first step toward this is maintaining an active comment section. Post your comment policy openly, so that your site and blog visitors know the comment section is open, and that it is moderated.
A moderated comment section is no drawback; rather, it is an advantage. Moderating the comments allows you to truly host the conversation, keeping out spam, bots, and trolls while answering genuine commenters and keeping your own eyes open to what your readers are saying. This will make the comment section more conducive to civil discussion and debate.
A last point on promoting reader engagement: make sure that you allow replies and rich media in the comment threads. The plain text allows single statements to start a conversation, while rich media is attractive to readers who may want to leave their thoughts with images, audio, or video rather than plain text.
Talk About Great Topics
The next area in which you can influence the quality of your online community is your content. Make sure that you post content that interests your site audience. Remember, your audience comes to you for a reason, and they’ll come back if you give them what they want. Great content isn’t just great writing, it’s also relevant and useful. The best content will include a hook to which your readers simply MUST respond.
You don’t have to work on content alone, however. User-generated content – UGC – is built on contributions from your audience and is a wonderful way to maintain a steady supply of fresh and relevant content on your website. A large part of UGC is derived from the comment section, so everything you do to enhance your comment participation is a boon to your website.
Start a Conversation
Finally, make sure that your comments are two-way. You don’t want readers to just leave a thought and go, you want them to engage with your site. Always reply to your readers’ comments, even if it’s just to say ‘thanks for posting.’ When you reply, you let them know that you are listening and that you care what they have to say. And when a reader asks a question, always answer it fully, even if another reader has already responded to the comment.
As the host on your website, it’s up to you make sure that your comment section is active and vibrant. It is work, but it will pay dividends. As your readers see that you are willing to engage with them, they’ll grow more willing to use the comment section. It takes time to get an online conversation going, but once you have it, you’ll see the benefits to your business.
Benefits of a Strong Online Community
When you develop an online community from your website audience, you’ll see gains in customer retention, sales, and customer service. You’ll find that customer base built on community has more invested in you and your business than one based on simple transactions. After all, a community is social by nature, and people place a great deal of value on social connections.
Heyoya is a game-changing voice comments platform that brings voice to online publishers, improving user engagement by allowing readers to express themselves beyond the medium of text. Heyoya is proven to increase brand affinity and the quality of user-generated content. In addition, Heyoya’s options for preventing spam and abusive content allow you to keep your comment section clean and civil while increasing reader interaction with your blog. Join Heyoya today and grow your community.
For more information on Heyoya, click here.
Is Content Still King?
Way back in 1996, Bill Gates foresaw today’s world of content-centered online marketing. In his essay, “Content is King,” Gates predicted that content would drive revenue on the internet, and compared it to the history of broadcasting. Much of what he wrote over twenty years ago is still true today. Content still holds the throne that Gates ascribed to it, for three distinct reasons: it speaks directly to customer concerns; it builds up your reputation; and it complements your SEO strategy.
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Content that Speaks to (and from) your Customers
Your content is your message to your customers. Writing strong content is your chance to speak directly to their concerns, by answering their questions. The prerequisite for strong content, in this context, is research. You need to know your customers, what they are searching for online, what products they are seeking, and what features they want.
While marketing research is the usual method of determining customer needs, you can also set up a comment platform and encourage your site users to leave their thoughts directly. Comments fall into the category of user-generated content, and will give you a look into the minds of your visitors. The best comment platforms will permit rich media, such as audio and visual files, in addition to plain text.
Design your website content around the building blocks of customer needs, and you’re on your way to meeting the second test.
Content Builds your Reputation
The second need addressed by content is your reputation, sometimes described as thought leadership. You need to set yourself up as a known expert in your niche, and you do this by tying every piece of content on your site into your main product. Your research here is different; you want to have all the facts at your fingertips, so that you can write with authority, giving accurate information on every topic you touch. Make your site the place where your customers go to get their questions answered.
Content and SEO – Perfect Partners
Finally, make sure to create your content in conjunction with your SEO strategy. SEO – the techniques of driving traffic to your site – works best as a holistic effort, combining back-end and front-end aspects of your website. Content lies on the front end. Content should follow the rules for SEO best practices, hold to good grammar and avoiding plagiarism, as well as match your back-end SEO, using your researched keywords and matching topics and phrasing from your meta tags. When well-written, good content will enhance your site’s SEO.
Staying in the Drivers’ Seat
Customer communication, reputation, and SEO are all important, but the foundation for all of them, and the reason why content truly remains the king of online marketing, is control. Your content is just that – yours. You create it, you commission it, you place it on your site. The content marketing strategy is where you make the decisions about the online public face of your business, implemented in the content you choose to display.
Good Content Brings Results
So, yes, content is still the king of online marketing; not for the first time, Bill Gates was right. The reason is easy enough to fathom: a smart content strategy brings results, boosting performance for many aspects of your website. You’ll see improved SEO, improved site traffic, and improved brand recognition. All of this will affect your online reputation and your customers will be happy.
Happy customers will bring with them the advantage of user-generated content, giving you a steady flow of new material, and keeping your content fresh. You can encourage user-generated content through a blog or social media, with a well-maintained comment section. Make sure to participate in resulting discussions to reap full advantage of this content.
Heyoya is a game-changing comments platform that brings voice to online publishers, improving user engagement by allowing readers to express themselves beyond the medium of text. Heyoya increases brand affinity and the quality of user-generated content, while preventing spam and abusive content and increasing your blog credibility through voice authentication. Encouraging user-generated content through voice or other rich media platforms is an important step in an effective content strategy. Join Heyoya today and grow your community.
For more information on Heyoya, click here.
Website Promotion with a Progressive Approach
As an online entrepreneur, your website is the public face of your business. If you’ve got a good design, relevant content, and a smoothly functioning back end, that’s great. Now you just have to get the word out. You need to promote your website.
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SEO for Online Website Promotion
Site promotion starts in the same place as so much of your online activity: with SEO. Good SEO, executed according to a clear, professional plan, is the first step toward increasing site traffic, which in turn is the first step toward good web promotion. After all, you can’t promote your website if no one sees it! Always start by doing your keyword research. In order to make the most of your web promotion efforts, you’ll need to know what your audience is looking for, and what they want. Keyword research, the process of finding out what your site visitors are search for, is an invaluable method for determining this.
Keep your Blog Promotion Fresh
Your blog may not be the central page of your site, but it is definitely central to your site promotion. Chances are, your blog is the section of your website that sees the most new content, with the most frequent content additions and updates. This keeps your content fresh, and is vital to blog promotion. When you combine your new blog content with your SEO research, you’ll be on track for effective website promotion.
One point to remember: in your blog promotion efforts, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Feel free to recycle your best themes and topics. Social media is a great place to reuse proven content for site promotion; you can use successful pieces to create related posts on a variety of social platforms, which in turn will work to drive your traffic.
Promote your Website with Paid Advertising
These day, so much focus in online promotion and advertising is on free or low-budget channels and getting great content together can take up a lot of time and effort. Sometimes though, free isn’t always the best option. Paid advertising can be a great tool to promote your website. There is no one-size-fits-all recipe for which ads work best, but with research you can find what platforms are best suited to your site content and opt for those. Pay per click, Facebook ads, and Google ads could all have their place in successful promotional efforts.
Remember to Promote your Website Offline, too!
The best marketers always use as many promotional channels as possible. It’s the only way to ensure the widest possible audience. You may be an online entity, but you exist in the offline world, too, and so it makes sense to take your site promotion offline.
The simplest method is just to stamp your URL on any physical promotional items you create. Put your site on your business cards, your office notepads and stationery, even pens and t-shirts if your circumstance permits. If it can get you noticed, it can be part of your site promotion.
Along those lines, make sure that you build a relationship with businesses in your local area. Do you have a nearby printer who delivers that office stationery? Let your customers know who you use, and ask him to show your notepads as samples of his work. Remember, he printed your site address on it, so it will count as website promotion. You can take a similar approach to other local businesses.
Website Promotion – Essential for Success
Your site won’t go anywhere if you don’t promote it. Successful promotion requires creative thought. Combining paid and free avenues, and the online and offline worlds, will give your site the widest possible exposure.
Heyoya is a game-changing comments platform that brings voice to online publishers, improving user engagement by allowing readers to express themselves beyond the medium of text. User-generated content and active comments are a proven method of leveraging your audience to work toward website promotion. Heyoya increases brand affinity and the quality of user-generated content, while preventing spam and abusive content & increasing your blog credibility through voice authentication. Join Heyoya today and grow your community.
For more information on Heyoya, click here.
How to use SEO, the right way
SEO is an incredible tool for any blog or content site that can drive traffic and increase your site visibility – when used well. But it’s also a rapidly evolving area that is constantly changing in terms of what works and what doesn’t. This means that using tactics that may have worked in the past might not get you results today. So what can you do to ensure that you use SEO in the best way possible for your business? Here are some tips and tricks to help you out.
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Avoid shoving keywords into your content
There was a time when SEO was all about loading your content with the maximum amount of keywords. Back then, content was stuffed full of keywords and content quality suffered. Not only were users put off by the terrible quality of the writing, search engines also started to respond. Today, search engines penalize “stuffing” SEO tactics and aiming to get as many keywords into a post as possible will actually mean your content performs worse.
Get the ratio right
Keyword stuffing might be out, but keywords themselves are not. So, when you write an article it’s important to add in the correct number of keywords. Recommended amounts are usually around 2-3% of your content. This allows you to create high quality meaningful content that includes relevant keywords but isn’t nonsensically stuffed full of them. A good way to structure things is to begin with SEO in mind. Too often, blogs will be written about one subject and SEO keywords will be inserted at a later date, which often leads to unnatural and unreadable content. The thing is, search engines favor well-written content, so writing well and avoiding heavy handedness can really pay off for your blog or website.
Never stop proofreading!
Ok, maybe never is the wrong word. But, make sure to proofread your content thoroughly as search engines penalize poor spelling and grammar. Even if you have a great writer, it’s always important to have a second set of eyes on each piece before you publish. And this can help with more than just minor errors. Having someone review a post can help weed out any ambiguity, sloppy writing or anything else that may be less appealing to search engines and potential readers.
Work on your comments section
SEO isn’t all about what you consciously and purposefully add to your writing. A lot of how your site gets ranked will be based on user-generated content (if you have it), and this can dramatically improve your ranking. Don’t have any user-generated content on your site yet? No problem – it’s incredibly easy to add. All you need to do is find a user-friendly and easy to install comments platform to encourage users to write their thoughts, opinions and more. And to make sure they get talking, use your content to ask questions, ask for engagement and even praise commenters who have made valuable contributions. When the comments do start rolling in, remember to respond to them. The best kind of user-generated content is a conversation, so grow your community by listening and responding to what people have to say.
Heyoya is a game-changing comments platform that brings voice to online publishers, improving user engagement and SEO by allowing readers to express themselves beyond the medium of text. Heyoya is proven to increase brand affinity and the quality of user-generated content, while preventing spam and abusive content & increasing reader interaction with your blog. Join Heyoya today and grow your community.
For more information on Heyoya, click here.
High Quality Content
High Quality Content
Online quality is built on your site content, and a reputation for quality will improve your website SEO and grow your brand affinity. When you take the time to build and encourage high quality content, you’ll find your site visitors quickly become returning visitors, and your overall traffic increases. Time invested in building quality is sure to bring a strong ROI.
All of this helps to build both reputation and quality, but there are other steps you can take that may be less obvious.
Tips for Improving Quality
First, make sure that the writing on your site is clear and easy to read. Unclear or ambiguous writing will leave readers feeling confused and likely to log off. Your visitors have found you online because they are looking for something, so make sure that the products and information you have to offer are not hiding behind bad writing.
Second, make sure that your website is focused on what you know. It’s easy to get sidetracked when you are writing online, but that’s a terrible pitfall. Ideally, each page – or page section – on your site should focus on one main idea, presented clearly and backed up with verifiable facts. You don’t need to be a great writer to achieve this, rather, just make sure that you write your website about what you know.
Next, make sure that you present original content all across your website. Plagiarism isn’t the way, and the search engines will penalize you for it, so take steps to avoid it! In addition to the negative benefit of not stealing someone else’s work, you’ll reap positive benefits, as well. Original content improves a site’s SEO rating, boosts your online reputation as an expert in your field, and encourages return traffic.
Finally, a quality website will include thought-provoking content. You want your readers to think about what you have to say, because that will encourage them to comment. And commenting brings us to Heyoya.
Heyoya – High Quality Content with Voice Comments
Heyoya is a voice comments platform that you can install on your website. It allows your site visitors to record and leave short voice comments, and for you to reply in kind. Voice comments are a great tool for allowing your site users to generate content. User-generated content means higher quality content since users can leave their thoughts in their own voice, giving your comment section greater authenticity, leading to higher conversion rates, improved site traffic, and higher user retention. In addition, the voice recordings, by adding another format on your site to attract search engine attention, will improve your site’s SEO.
The immediate result is a better quality of communication, with better group participation through the proliferation of user-generated content. The compelling nature of UGC will also improve your brand’s image. Encouraging and using UGC will is the surest path toward populating your comments with content that is both authentic and persuasive.
High Quality Content Leads to a High Quality Website
Your website’s success depends on quality: quality content, quality comments, and quality communication. User generated content is a rapidly growing path toward improving the quality of your content, by turning content generation from a one-way street from you to the user to a two-way street on which you and your site users converse together, adding content, building trust, and forming a true community.
Heyoya on Mobile
Stepping into the Mobile World
These days, it seems that everyone is on the go. Our lives are busier than ever, our leisure time is precious, and digital technology keeps us connected wherever we are. That connection has also begun to blur the line between work and leisure, as the web, especially through tablet and smartphone connections, makes it possible to combine our online work and personal lives to a degree never dreamed of just a generation ago.
Reaching out to Mobile Customers
The mobile customer is an important, and growing segment of your online audience. In fact, early in 2017, mobile internet usage surpassed traditional desktop traffic. A large segment of web users, especially among the younger generations, experiences the internet primarily through mobile devices – tablets and smartphones.
This is not to say that they ignore desktop or laptop computers; convertible keyboards for tablets, giving the devices an at-will laptop replacement capability, are a popular accessory, particularly among high school and college students. However, it is clear that the future of internet access is with mobile devices. It’s an artifact of our busy culture, but it is also fueled by advancements in the hardware of tech. Laptops are getting smaller and lighter, tablets and smartphones are overlapping more and more, both of these computing segments are starting to rival, or even surpass, the traditional desktop in computing capacity. For online businesses, this is the time to adapt to the trend.
Heyoya on Mobile
Heyoya’s voice comment plugin for website makes it easy for your site visitors to respond to your website, from anywhere and at any time. The Heyoya widget is compatible with most tablet and smartphone devices, can function through all of the common mobile browsers, and works with both iOS and Android systems. Heyoya on mobile platforms allows your users to record voice comments when they are on the go, and from your backend, you can track those comments on your own mobile device.
Voice is Adapted to Mobile
Voice commenting platforms, like Heyoya, are uniquely ready to take full advantage of mobile computing. Mobile users are already comfortable with speaking into their devices, and use that capability in chat and messaging functions. Heyoya’s voice commenting platform simply takes that existing feature of a smartphone or tablet and turns it to the advantage of your website. With voice through Heyoya, you can stay connected with the fastest growing segment of the online market.
Easy to Use Dashboard
Don’t Forget the Backend of the Site!
It’s easy, sometimes, to forget to maintain the backend of your websites. You spend so much time and effort working on the front end, facing the customers, that it’s easy to overlook your own needs. Keep out of that trap; always make sure that your website functions properly. A fully functioning site will present a seamless frontend for the user, allowing a smooth experience for your potential customers.
The backend of your site is incredibly important though, and that’s because it will provide you with the feedback and insights you need to learn more about your audience and the way they interact with your comments. One of the best ways to see which type of content is most engaging is to look at the ways your readers comment on it. Ultimately, keeping a close eye on your analytics will allow you to create more winning content and make sure to get even more traction.
Easy to Use Dashboard
The Heyoya voice comments platform provides you with an easy to use dashboard, so that you can monitor incoming comments to your website, as well set the properties a customer-facing customer-facing side of the voice commenting interface. Among the options you can include are traditional text comments, Heyoya’s signature voice recordings, and other rich media like video and gifs. You can choose to receive notifications on flagged comments, permitting you to efficiently filter out spam and other abuse, and you can also choose to send notifications to your commenters to encourage higher participation rates on reply threads. All in all, Heyoya’s dashboard options make the platform customizable, to fit your website, your company, and your needs.
You also can use Heyoya’s analytic options to gain a more detailed picture of your site users. You’ll be able to see their countries of origin, as well comment-specific data such as the number of voice comments left or played back. This can give you a demographic picture of who is on your site, as well as which pages are generating more discussion. Backend site maintenance is essential for keeping your website looking good for the users; site analytics let you make decisions what those users will see.
Heyoya Helps You Maintain the Frontend
Remember, the frontend of your website is the online face of your business. If it doesn’t work right, you’ll just turn off a large segment of your potential audience. You can address this from the backend, by making sure that everything about your site works correctly behind the scenes. Heyoya’s dashboard features allow you to track, monitor, filter, and respond to your site’s commenters, showing them a well-organized operation and an attentive business. It’s first step to success.
24/7 Support
24/7 Support
Who doesn’t need some help from time to time, especially after installing a new piece of software? It’s just a fact of life in the digital age that sometimes, the tech won’t work. When that happens, you turn to the support department and look for answers. You provide support for your customers, and you expect to get it when you need it from your own service providers.
And however great a service is, from time to time you are bound to have questions or queries that need an answer.
The Importance of Customer Support
Good customer support helps resolve problems quickly, before they get out of hand. When you get a support email, or see request for support in the comments, attend to it right away. Don’t let it wait. Just as you know that your problems are important, so is this guy’s, and he’s turned to you for help solving it. Give it to him the help he needs, and do it quickly and politely. Nothing beats service with a smile.
You’ll reap two immediate benefits from fast, successful, customer support: an increase in customer satisfaction, and a gain in revenue. These are related, of course, since happy customers are more likely to convert for sales, leading to higher revenue. It’s always a good investment to provide good customer support.
Support When You Need It
Heyoya knows the importance of supporting customers. Our team is available to solve your voice comments platform issues, when you need us. You can always reach the Heyoya team by email, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, year round. We’ll respond promptly, to answer your questions or provide solutions for any voice comments related issues that you may have.
While many commenting platforms use automated help services, bots or simply refer you to a premade FAQ center, at Heyoya we can promise you that you can talk to a real person whenever you need support. We do have a help center with information on many existing queries, but, if you are having an issue with any aspect of the service or have any question you’d like an answer to, do not hesitate to reach out. One of our team members will be in touch promptly with an answer.
You can even forward issues from your own customers. If your site users are having difficulties with the Heyoya voice comments platform, let us know and we’ll work out a solution. Whatever you need, and whenever you need it, for you or your audience, the Heyoya team is here for you. You can contact us at support@heyoya.com.
Share and Engage
Social media has changed the way we engage with each other online. The proliferation of social posts, with their features of short length, quick replies, and ease of sharing, has made online conversations faster and more dynamic than ever before. Enabling social sharing options for comments and other submitted content encourages user engagement, with benefits for site SEO and online community development.
With Heyoya, you can bring the full advantages of social sharing to your website. Heyoya is a voice comment platform, a format that, like social sharing, encourages user participation. When you install the Heyoya widget, your site visitors can leave their comments as voice recordings, and can share those comments to social media platforms at the click of a button.
Engaging Your Customers to Build Community
Customer engagement is the surest way to build a community around your product. Engaged customers and website visitors generate both content and discussion with their comments, providing a steady flow of original content for your site. When that content is shared to social media, it improves your site’s visibility to search engines, further boosting your online profile and SEO.
Social media sharing, and the engagement that goes along with it, have the additional benefit of increasing your website’s reach. Every time a commenter shares their voice recording, or your page, to a social media platform, your site, with all of its information, ideas, and community, becomes visible to that commenter’s network. This quick expansion of your potential audience is the single greatest revolution brought to marketing by social media.
Sharing is Caring
Marketing is the art of making your product visible to the masses. In today’s digital world, social media has become an indispensable tool, offering fast routes to wider audiences and greater potential for converting those audiences to customers. Heyoya gives you the option of one-click sharing for every post on your site’s comment section, making every site visitor a potential marketer – for you. And as a voice platform, Heyoya is especially suited for social engagement; web research has shown that site users are more likely to engage with rich media content – voice, video, gifs – than plain text. Sharing that content to social media has become the web user’s way of showing that he cares about what he just saw.
Use Heyoya to Build Engagement
Customer engagement with your site, and the community feeling that comes with it, depends on a combination of clear communication, entertaining and useful content, and ease of social media access. Heyoya gives you all three. Site users have an easier time leaving voice comments than text, and such comments convey a point more clearly than written words. Voice recording are also, frankly, more fun to listen to and engage with than text – users can hear the nuance of speech and get more meaning from the content. And finally, one-click sharing makes the comments simple to engage on social media. All of these advantages will flow organically from the Heyoya platform.
Three Tips to Keeping your Content Relevant
One of the hardest points in blogging is keeping your finger on the readers’ collective pulse. You need to do this, though; to be successful, your blog must engage your audience and keep them coming back for more. We’ve assembled three go-to tips for keeping your website and blog content fresh, relevant, and tailored to the needs of your audience.
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Curate your Content
Our first tip is basic: Develop aggregated content. This is a shortcut in content creation, designed to take advantage of the sheer size of the internet: With thousands of new pages going up every day, there is sure to be something that connects with both your niche and your audience’s needs. Find them, read them, understand them. And then, write up a series of short summaries, and post them, along with links to the source material, on your blog. In short, turn an occasional blog post into a link central of relevant materials. This has the added SEO advantage of populating your blog with hyperlinks to similar pages. As a technique, this is called content curation and used in moderation it is a good tool for keeping your site up to date.
Employ Rich Media
Rich media is a broad category, encompassing still images, GIFs, video and audio files, and even voice recordings. In short, rich media content has gone beyond traditional plain text, providing additional media that add greater nuance and layers of meaning. With rich media, including a voice comments platform, you and your readers have more and better tools to promote understanding. This combination of greater nuance and depth in commenting has, like content curation, another advantage: it has been proven to attract more comments and to encourage conversation.
Promote User-Generated Content
Encouraging conversation on your website or blog brings up the third mode for keeping your site content tailored to your audience’s needs: user-generated content. User-generated content is anything that your visitors post to your website. It includes reviews and comments of all sorts, whether they are moderated or not. Allowing user-generated content is an easy way to keep a steady flow of original material coming onto your site, but, like the methods above, it also has an added advantage. User-generated content is a direct look at your readers’ minds; when you see it, you’ll know exactly what your audience is thinking and what they want, because they are telling you. With user-generated comments, not only will you keep fresh content on your site, but it will be much easier to direct new posts and comment threads to the precise points that your audience wants to know about.
The Common Denominator
All three of these methods for maintaining relevant, original content on your website have one important factor in common: they all empower your audience. By aggregating and curating interesting content, making use of rich media, and encouraging user participation, you provide information to your readers and make your communication a two-way street. You will turn communication into a true conversation.
Heyoya is a game-changing comments platform that brings voice to online publishers, improving user engagement by allowing readers to express themselves beyond the medium of text. By permitting voice comments and other rich media content on your site, Heyoya is proven to increase brand affinity and the quality of user-generated content. Join Heyoya today and grow your community.
For more information on Heyoya, click here.