Photography: Interacting with the art 3192 by vertigonoir

This post is part of the Simple Web series. It’s best enjoyed in light of Part I (an introduction), Part II (how to grip readers), and Part III (how to resonate with them), but will make sense in its own right.

In this post we’ll be looking at ways to encourage readers to interact with your site. I’ll be focusing on three key areas of interaction: subscribing to your feed, commenting, and exploring more deeply.

Building your subscriber base

1. Move your feed icon to the top of your sidebar. As I discussed on a recent article about basic usability, readers looking to perform an action they’ve repeated elsewhere (such as subscribing to a feed) will first look for the ’standard’ — in other words, the way things are usually done. Feed icons are usually near the top of the page, so we should look to emulate this.

2. Add a ’subscribe’ message to the bottom of your articles. I’ve noticed an increase in feed subscribers since adding the message you can see at the bottom of this post (if you’re viewing directly on the site).

I suspect this is for a number of reasons: 1) someone who has taken the time to read to the end of your article is probably feeling good about your content and 2) visitors are still in ‘reading’ mode and will probably take in the message. You might also consider adding a feed icon and even your feed count to add visual impact.

3. Promote incentives. Chris Garrett offers a free eBook to every feed subscriber. Others have run competitions and offered prizes via their feed footer. What’s your incentive?

4. List the benefits. Most site owners advertise their feed as a benefit in itself. Another option might be to tell readers exactly what they’re going to get. To use the example above, ChrisG.com accompanies its subscribe icon with:

Receive more blogging and marketing tips, new media news and a FREE eBook.

Highlighting the value of subscribing to your site is a good way to increase subscriber numbers.

Encourage comments

1. Make leaving a comment the easiest thing to do after finishing an article. This is the time when the reader’s reaction is still fresh, so you want to make the segueway into commenting as smooth as possible.

2. Ask for opinions. Opinions are easy. We all have them, and on non-controversial topics, there’s little personal investment involved in providing them. Asking for experiences is a little more difficult as it requires readers (to a varying extent) to step out of their comfort zone.

A simple tip: if you want to hear what readers have to say, ask them.

3. Rethink the recent comments widget. The most common format for this widget is ‘name’ commented on ‘headline’. For the reader, this means: “Name I don’t recognize commented on article I haven’t read yet.” Not much value.

A far better option, I think, would be to include a 50 word excerpt of the most recent comment in the sidebar. This provides some interesting reading in its own right and may encourage the reader to want to give the comment some context. You can see another alternative I quite like at this personal finance blog. The key is that the widget shows other people are not just commenting in general, but leaving interesting and insightful comments on the site.

4. Make commenting worthwhile. If you participate in comments on blogs you read, you’ll probably notice that there is a ‘polite’ culture on non-political/controversial blogs, where commenters tend to restrict themselves to addressing either the post or its author, but rarely engage with other commenters.

This means that if you don’t respond to commenters you can’t count on others responding for you. If you don’t respond, the commenter will never know if you even read their input or not. This doesn’t make the act of commenting very rewarding for them.

Even a one word response (if you’re strapped for time) will show the commenter you’ve acknowledged their opinion. A blogger who interacts with commenters in a meaningful way, and gets plenty of comments because of it, is Michael Martin. You can see some examples at his excellent blog customization blog.

Build a site readers want to explore

1. Offer your best content to each new visitor. I’m a big fan of the ‘Popular Posts’ sidebar addition and all its variants. I don’t recommend using a plug-in for this, however. Most of us know which of our posts caught fire with readers and which didn’t. Construct your own selection of great posts and make them as prominent as possible. I’d recommend putting them under your feed button.

Why? Because impressive headlines show the new visitor just how much your site has to offer. They provide an entry into the depths of your site after the reader has finished with the main page.

2. Simplify and be picky. A long list of great content is less likely to be engaged with than a short one. A short one is manageable, it makes the headlines easier to read, and it allows the reader the possibility of reading all of them if they so choose. A long list can be intimidating and will make it harder for your really stellar articles to stand-out. I’d recommend having around five great articles showcased in your design, but you might experiment with other numbers.

3. There are better alternatives to ‘Most Recent’ posts. Unless your articles are really long a ‘Recent Posts’ sidebar area probably won’t be interacted with. It’s much easier to scroll down and get an overview of posts as a whole than try to pick-out headlines from the sidebar.

My suggestion would be to replace the ‘Recent Posts’ widget with a ‘Popular’ or ‘Favorite posts’ list. Readers already have access to your recent posts, but should never have to dig into your archives to uncover your best stuff.

How this ties into the ‘Simple Web’

If your site doesn’t grip readers, it won’t have a chance to resonate with them. If it doesn’t resonate, readers won’t feel compelled to interact in the ways described above.

If it doesn’t resonate, readers won’t feel compelled to talk about you. The next post in the ‘Simple Web‘ series will focus on ways you can encourage readers to link and share your site and its content.

Two challenges, if you’d like them:

• Do something to make it easier to interact with your site
• Remove an obstacle to interaction

Care to interact?

The series is one post away from drawing to a close and I’d be interested to know how you felt it went. Is there anything you didn’t understand, or would have liked more information on? Has it encouraged you to do anything differently? Did it engage you, or leave you cold?

As always, I look forward to reading and responding to all feedback/questions.