Blogs

Conversational content is the base ingredient to any blog truly thriving and engaging a community long-term. It’s always good to make sure your content is grammatically at its best and spellchecked of course.

But keep in mind, we don’t grammatically correct ourselves mid-conversation and it would be odd if we did.

What we really do in conversation is strive for a connection, an “aha” moment, a shared encounter that leaves both participants (or the community) feeling heard and responded to.

Building conversational content is all about balancing the conversation and ensuring that you have a place at the table, and that your community feels they’re also breaking bread with you as well. We all enjoy a lively conversation so keep in mind that it’s ok to encourage debate. What follows are five tips to help empower your “conversational content.”

Five Tips for Empowering Conversational Content:

1. Ask questions in your blog posts. Identify what you’re thinking about and encourage others to chime in. Don’t control the conversation - engender the conversation.

2. Write your blog posts with links to other stories on major sites, and then share your own spin on those stories and encourage your community of readers to do the same. Just as you would share your opinion with friends and family, do the same on your blog.

3. Once a week commit to doing one blog post that highlights at least five other bloggers you read and why you like what they are doing. You’d be amazed at how this engenders not only “link love” but also a real spirit of repricocity.

4. If your original blog post engenders deep discussion around the topic, and you want to follow up with other posts, why not ask someone who has already commented to guest post on the topic on your blog. That keeps the conversation lively and diverse.

5. Don’t dominate the content with your own opinions. Use your blog as a platform to drive conversational content to a higher place of thought. Open the door, start the discussion and hope that it inspires your community to converse more deeply than you thought was imaginable.

Now to see how conversation can really work check out a clip from the Big Chill, one my favorite movies, and look for where William Hurt says, “I was just trying to keep the conversation lively.”

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