Your audience is your biggest asset, so take advantage of what they have to share with you. As a blogger with a readership, you're in a fortunate position and can enlist in their help when you need them. Chances are, they'll be eager to participate.
1. Ask the readers: If you're looking for ideas, you can always run a column where you ask the readers a question and invite their answers in comments. You may even choose to expound upon one of the ideas written in a comment and make it a separate blog post (or series, if there are just so many great comments). At the same time, you may want to let the readers ask you a question. Don't be afraid to share information about yourself and open up.
2. Utilize contact forms: Ensure that you launch your blog with a contact form so that your readers can contact you in some way. There are many plugins available that enable you to set up a simple contact form where your users can add questions and service providers can even send related pitches to your address. After you become an established blogger, you'll likely be contacted by traditional media for quotes and you'll likely even be asked to provide help on consulting for related businesses.
3. Keep the comments open: The biggest part of a blog from a social media perspective is the ability for community members to be participants and to have a many-to-many relationship (rather than a one-to-many relationship that is so common in traditional media spheres). You can now share information and you can get feedback almost instantly. Engage in the discussion wherever you're able; don't just stop at the blog post and ignore the comments. Also, a word of advice: don't make it difficult for your readers to post comments. Everyone should be able to write something without registration. If you are worried about spam comments, install a CAPTCHA. If you are worried about link drops, consider adding nofollow to commented posts (though be advised that nofollow is the default on most blogs) or moderate all comments before they are approved. Just don't give off the impression that it's hard for your community to partake in the conversation.
4. Contests: A great way to build an audience quickly is to hold a contest. Ideally, run a contest while you're still growing but aren't too small, since you wouldn't want to disappoint yourself if there's little interest. Offer prizes (a free year of your service, a product offering, or in the case of an informational blog, you may be able to solicit prizes from sponsors). People love freebies, and this is a good way to keep them hooked.
5. Polls/Surveys: Engage your readers further (beyond traditional question and answer and commenting) by holding polls related to your topic. You can use a number of tools to host polls and surveys, including PollDaddy (http://www.polldaddy.com) and Survey Monkey (http://www.surveymonkey.com). You can spend one post asking your readers for their inputs and then report on the findings in a follow-up post.
Four Elements blog is your daily source of news, tips and trends for web 2.0, search engine optimization and our future web. We help entrepreneurs and business owners correctly integrate emerging technology. Four Elements helps clients succeed, in all economic climates, through personalized integration of social networks, social media, blogs, widgets, wikis, cloud computing, search engine optimization, social bookmarks, web tools and mobile technology.Link to original post