Blogging can be a huge asset to your website and business, but only if it engages your readers.

Web logs (blogs) were around long before Facebook or Twitter, and along with email, blogging was one of the first forms of social networking. When it comes to online marketing, few things can be as beneficial to your business as blogging. That said, there are a few important things marketers need to know before jumping into the world of blogging.

Engagement is crucial if you want your blog to succeed. Indexing thousands of blog posts is great, but only if there are people showing up to read and share them. So, how do you go about optimizing your blog for maximum engagement?

Below are 6 helpful blogging tips that you can use to increase engagement with your audience.

1. Write What You Know

This may seem like a given. After all, if you know about wine, you’re not necessarily going to start a blog about brain surgery. (Unless you’re a brain surgeon with a phenomenal palate.) And as long as you write about what you know, it will not be long before your audience perceives you as an expert and begins to engage with your content.

On the other hand, writing ignorantly will turn your audience off, and you’ll have a tough time getting them to stick around or come back for more.

2. Integrate Your Social Channels

It should be easy for your audience to share your content. If they like what they see, they should be able to easily share it with their friends. This is the viral effect and it is one of the fastest ways to build your audience (and clout). So when you build your blog, make it social friendly. Each post should have the ability to be shared right from the page. (ShareThis and Shareaholic are great integrations for this.)

3. Write for Your Audience

Be sure you know who you are writing for and use a rhetoric appropriate for them. Going back to the example of the brain surgeon, the doctor surely knows a lot of technical jargon, and that would be great if he or she is writing for the medical community. But if the posts are intended for you average patient audience, then using latin phrases and medical terminology may not be the best option. You want to be sure that the audience you are writing for is able to relate to the content. Otherwise, how could they be engaged? They don’t understand!

4. Address Important Issues

When people read blogs, they are looking for a few specific things. The overall theme of these things: value. If I am going to take time out of my day to read your blog, I need to know that I am getting something out of it. So when you start blogging, consider writing about a few of the following:

• Addressing common problems, issues, questions.
• Focus on industry-specific keywords.
• Lists (Top 6 Blogging Tips, 5 Best Social Media Tools, etc.)
• Pros and Cons (product comparison/review articles).

These are just a few of the hottest topics to cover when writing a blog. These types of posts see much higher engagement and are typically what people are looking for when they stumble upon your post organically.

5. Be Original

There are billions of indexed pages on the web and hundreds of millions of blogs. Chances are, unless you are a Nobel Prize-winning theorist, other people are talking about the same topic you are. So think carefully about what angle you want to use when approaching your topic, and emphasize what will make you stand out from the crowd. You might be saying the same thing as a lot of others, but your idea isn’t just X, it’s X plus Y. When people see something they haven’t seen before, or even see something familiar in a different light, they are going to be intrigued.

6. Close with a Call-to-Action

Whether it’s a request to sign up, a question or asking your readers to share the article, you want to close out every post with a call-to-action (CTA). CTA’s are statistically proven to increase engagement for one simple reason: people respond to them. The best way to engage with your audience is to get the process started for them, and when it comes to blogging, the best way to do that is to incite a second step at the end of your post.

These are just a few helpful pointers that you can apply to your blogging to increase engagement. There is plenty more that can be done, but each of these methods is shown to give engagement a boost.

Which of these tips do you think is most beneficial to increasing blogging engagement? Can you think of others? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!