Hooking the Reader - How to Get Them to Participate?

One of the biggest challenges with trying to get a blog to take off, is getting the users to participate. Currently, the flow of information is only from me, the author, to you, the readers. To make this blog more interesting, and to leverage the readership, I need to find ways for the readers to participate in creating content. With participation, the commitment of the reader will also be elevated to a new level, compelling the reader to come back to see how his or her contribution has been received by the other readers.

The simplest way, conceptually, is commenting on the blog. Unfortunately, the threshold for commenting tends to be rather high unless the subject is controversial or the author is really, really wrong. With blogs, discovering other means of participation can be challenging. Googling "blog participation" yields results which tend to sum up to the following suggestions:

• Make commenting easy
• Be controversial
• Encourage round-table conversations
• Hold polls

Again, we come back to the problem that encouraging blog participation would require a somewhat active reader-base to begin with. So again, there seems to be no shortcut to happiness, which is somewhat of a problem as one of the goals of this blog is to find all the possible shortcuts.

So, dear readers, to engourage participation, I'm holding a poll in this blog. Participate!