The blogosphere is a pretty big place these days. So big in fact, it seems to be getting more and more difficult to pull in a decent readership let alone garner a healthy dose of engagement on your posts.

This problem is particularly frustrating because of the incredibly rich content and innovative ideas that often go virtually unnoticed. Simply attracting eyes to your blog is the primary hurdle bloggers are faced with, but there's a another dimension to blogging that is often left out of the discussion when it comes to encouraging readers to participate in your content--style.

Bloggers have great ideas all the time but are often kept relatively invisible to the idea-hungry public because of style choices that are either:

1. Not appropriate for the subject matter

or

2. Are too dense and time-consuming to read

To give a brief example of what I mean, imagine yourself as a blogger with some kind of groundbreaking idea you want to present on your blog. You know this idea will catch on if you can just get enough of your readers to engage with it to the point of sharing it through the tendrils of social media.

Without any forethought, you sit down with your laptop and let your idea spill out into the word processor in a big dense clump of text. Since you want to get it out to your audience as soon as possible, you proofread it, tag it, and send it out with a big grin on your face; confident your work will soon grant you praise and admiration amongst your peers.

Three days later however, you're on the edge of tears. Zero comments, zero shares, and a handful of likes and tweets. Defeated, you hang your head in shame as another great idea goes largely unseen by the masses.

What went wrong? Your block of text was most likely too daunting for readers to invest their time and brainpower in. On top of that, a rambling stream-of-consciousness-style approach confused readers and prevented them from understanding the fundamental aspect of the idea that made it so unique.

Making your ideas concise and organized is extremely important if you want to entice readers to share and engage with your material. Here are a few writing styles that can be used as starting points for your blog content:

1. Create Video Content

A multitude of text-only posts gives your audience only one way to digest your content. Diversifying your blog with videos can make your content much more approachable by a wider audience. In terms of engagement, presenting your brand through multimedia will more than likely generate much more user sharing than a text post.

According to a study carried out by both M Booth and SimplyMeasured, video are shared 12 times more than text and links combined.

Moreover, you don't need to be a good writer to craft video content--just a basic understanding of recording, editing and media sharing.

2. Carry Out Interviews

If you're noticing a downward trend in blog engagement, your subscribers might simply be bored with single-authored content day after day. Consider finding a colleague or peer that could bring a slightly different flavor of content to your blog through a question and answer format.

If you're a company with happy customers, craft a series of questions that will tease out exactly what makes your product or service useful to people. These kinds of back-and-forths are great at generating questions among readers and will often inspire people to respond with thoughts and concerns.

3. Invite Guest Bloggers To Contribute As Authors

Many bloggers are now transitioning to a more socially constructed blog structure that encourages subscribers to submit original content for possible posting on more high-traffic blogs.

Whether you're a small blog looking to expand readership by any means possible, or a larger blog with an audience big enough to feed smaller contributors in your industry, adopting this new layout is beneficial for everyone involved when it comes to generating reader engagement.

Photo credit: Dave McLear