Eric Siu: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: And today we're going to talk about seven tips for increasing engagement with your blog. Neil, what's number one?

Neil Patel: Number one, use the words 'you' and 'I' within your blog posts. When you're writing in a conversational tone by using the words 'you' and 'I', it feels like you're creating a conversation versus you're talking at someone, right? Think about a college lecturer. The moment your professor's talking at you, what are you going to do? You're going to fall asleep, or at least that's what I did. So when you create a conversational tone, people are much more engaged, they're more likely to comment.

Eric Siu: Number two, we just talked about live chat. Add a live chat button to your blog. You can use Drift, you can use Hotjar, you can use Intercom. Whatever you want to do, guess what? When people are reading our blog, when they come maybe two or three times, or they're spending three minutes or so, you have a little pop-up that shows up saying, "Hey, by the way, do you want more content like this? If you do, just hit 'yes', and then we'll actually take your email and it pushes into our email list." We get more engagement because people come into our list and they come back and read our content more.

Neil Patel: Number three, wrap up your blog posts with a conclusion. I've done a lot of tests, usability tests on blog posts, and what I found is a large portion of your readers will go to the blog post, scroll all the way down and then, assuming they like the conclusion, they'll go back up and start reading the rest of the post. So make sure you wrap up each post with the conclusion.

Eric Siu: Number four, think about adding different types of content, not just written word but think about how you can add, integrate audio into it, you can integrate video into it as well, because some people like to look at that stuff, especially a lot of people are consuming my content on mobile nowadays and it's the same thing for Neil. You have different things that are available for people, give them different options, and that leads to more engagement not just on your blog, but it pushes to other channels that you're hosting these things on as well.

Neil Patel: Number five, make sure you respond to all of your comments, so when someone leaves a comment, if you respond to them, they're much more likely to come back, engage again and leave more comments. If you engage with others to show that you care, you respond, you answer their questions, you know what? You'll even build some relationships and you may learn a few things, so make sure you respond to comments.

Eric Siu: Number six, this kind of goes without saying but if you have your e-mail list, you have your social media channels, you have all these things out there, why aren't you using them? Because if you bring them back to your blog, naturally it's going to increase engagements and that's just the way it is. People tend to forget about how important it is to ... maybe using a tool like Meet Edgar to take the evergreen content that you have and then just push it back to your blog because guess what? Not everybody sees the content that you're pushing out. If you look at the velocity of let's say this podcast, not everybody is going to see everything, right? So you hook it into something like Meet Edgar, and don't forget about your e-mail channels too, and that's going to increase engagement naturally, because they're showing back up on your blog.

Neil Patel: Number seven, make sure you're using content upgrade. Content upgrade is like bonus material. Let's say someone comes to your blog and they're reading something on 27 ways to boost your traffic for a small and medium business. You can have a content upgrade that is 'download the cheat sheet with the 27 tactics'. The title needs to be better but you get the point. You can use a lot of different tools to create content upgrades, such as ... What's one of them, Eric?

Eric Siu: You can use Thrive Themes.

Neil Patel: There you go, it's Thrive plugin.

Eric Siu: Thrive something, there's a bunch of stuff.

Neil Patel: There you go. You can use Thrive, you can use Hello Bar. I believe OptinMonster also has content upgrades, but there's a ton of solutions out there and what you'll find is it's one of the best ways to generate e-mails. You generate the e-mails, then you get people to keep coming back to your site by e-mailing every time you have a new blog post, and your engagement will go up.

Eric Siu: Great, and a bonus to that one, Leadpages is ... what I like about Leadpages is there's different content upgrades available, and now you actually have the ability to add a content upgrade and people can actually take out their credit card and pay within that content upgrade. Integrated with Stripe, I think that's really cool and that tends to work out. So, before we go we have a special giveaway for you. Let's forget about the one-week giveaway, we're giving away 90 days of Crazy Egg, which is $300 in value to every single person. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway, and we will see you tomorrow. This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of, and don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School.