PB025: Ask Your Readers a Question [Day 25 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog] - a podcast by Darren Rowse: Blogger, Speaker, Author and Online Entrepreneur

How to Ask Your Blog Readers aQuestion
Today's episode is about how to ask your blog readers a question. It might be a scary idea at first, but it's quick and easy to do and can be a very powerful way to grow your blog.




Do you have a question? by Chad Freeman on 500pxIn this Episode
You can listen to today's episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we'd also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). Today we talk about:

Ten benefits of asking your readers questions12 tips and ideas for asking your readers questions on your blog
Examples of question blog postsHow to get responses to question posts, even when you don't think you have enough readers

Further Reading:The #1 Question You Should Be Asking Your Blog Readers: The Blog Maven
The Essential Guide to Creating a Survey Your Readers will Love: Blog Tyrant8 Questions to Ask to Get to Know Your Readers: Wise Ink
Know Your Audience: 8 Questions You Need to Ask: Mass TransmitFull Transcript
Expand to view full transcriptCompress to smaller transcript viewWelcome to the ProBlogger podcast episode 25 and day 25 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, where I’m giving you a different challenge every day for a month to help you to build some blogging habits that will help to grow your blog. Today’s challenge is one that I use regularly in my own blogs and I see many successful bloggers doing. Today, you’re going to write a post that asks your readers a question. It could actually be a really simple post for you to write, but it can build a lot of engagement with your readers. Today, I’m going to share a whole heap of reasons why you might want to ask questions, but also give you a series of tips on asking questions that are relevant and helpful, to build that engagement with your readers.You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/25, where I would love to also hear how you found today’s challenge and see a link to the post that you wrote.

Hi, this is Darren from ProBlogger. Welcome to day 25 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. I hope you’ve been enjoying the challenges so far. We’re actually in the final week. Today’s one is one that you could repeat over time. In fact, many of the challenges we’ve done in previous days could be something that you build into your monthly workflow, but this is definitely one that I would encourage you to use on a regular basis. It’s a writing challenge, but it’s one that doesn’t really have to take a whole heap of time today. In fact, it might be the shortest post you’ve ever written because all I’m asking you to do today is to ask your readers a question in a blog post. Your blog post might be just a question or it might be part of a blog post.There are many benefits of asking your readers questions. Firstly, it gives your readers a sense of community, participation, and belonging. There’s nothing like coming to a blog where readers are interacting with one another. It gives a sense of social proof and it makes your readers feel like they belong, that they own the blog in some sense. It also increases your blog’s stickiness. People are much more likely to come back to the blog tomorrow and in an ongoing way if they have contributed something to it. Questions are also relatively easy to ask, these posts are fairly effortless to write, although they can take some moderating and you do want to put some time into thinking carefully about the questions you’re asking.

Question posts are also really helpful for you to learn about your readers and to gauge where they’re at. They can also fuel post ideas for you as you say how your readers interact with your question, and they can also open up opportunities for follow up posts. In fact, sometimes when I’ve started a series of posts with a question, that’s worked quite well. Well-worded questions also can rank really wel...

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