Engaging Your Readers with Online Polls

Engaging your readers is an important part of running a successful blog. You may write stimulating and thought provoking articles, but if there’s no call to action or reason for your readers to to leave you feedback, what purpose does it serve? Is your blog simply a repository of information or is it an evolving community of like-minded people who share thoughts and ideas?

Asking your readers questions is a great way to stimulate conversation and motivate them to post comments on your article. But, more often than not, if your question has a finite set of answers, you probably won’t get as many responses as you like. For example, if I asked you what platform your blog runs on, would you take the time to comment on this article? Probably not.

If you want to ask your readers a question that doesn’t require a discussion, try using an online poll.

Vizu is a free service that allows you to create online polls. The polls created with Vizu are compatible with WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, and MySpace and many others. You can create multiple choice and number range polls and style the poll to match your site’s color scheme.

You can see an example of a Vizu poll on the right-hand side of this site. The thing I like most about the Vizu web polls is that your users can vote and see the results without leaving your site.

Please take a few moments and tell me what you are interested in reading on this site. I’m always interested in hearing the opinions of my readers, so if there’s something specific you want me to write about, leave a comment or send me an e-mail.

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