Chatbots and the Changing Art of Blogging
You’ve followed blogging bibles to the T, from keyword research to creating search optimised content to leveraging existing content on your social channels. You were expecting incoming traffic – you got it! What you weren’t expecting is that high bounce rate and that low average session duration.
Today, it’s no secret that a high-value content driven blog is an indispensable way of voicing your ideas and opinions, establishing authority, attracting a following from social avenues and showing up on search results .
However, getting your voice heard by thousands and then maintaining a blog that gets enough traction is not that easy anymore, is it?
In a sea full of high ranking bloggers, influencers and evangelists, today becoming a top blogger entails a list of tasks: engage readers, interact with them on different channels, network with fellow bloggers, guest post, have an email campaign in place, make ebooks, host AMAs and the list goes on.
Not to mention, there’s a plethora of content online with more than 76 million blog posts published every day! The clutter is overwhelming.
Bye, bye old-school blogging hacks.
[bctt tweet=”AI and chatbots provide a new and powerful way of creating and consuming content.” username=”blogherald”]The recent boom of messaging platforms, AI and chatbots have provided a new and powerful way of creating and consuming content.
As digital marketing pioneer Gary Vaynerchuck puts it, “Blogging is not dead. It’s as alive as ever. Blogging has simply morphed and changed into a much broader category where blog creation, and the question to where you should be starting a blog, is very different.”
[bctt tweet=”Blogging has morphed and changed into a broader category where blog creation is very different.” username=”blogherald”]Quick, on-demand, niche content is dominating the internet which makes chatbots absolutely invaluable to us bloggers. While there are tons of chatbot creation platforms and frameworks available out there, picking the right tool to match your needs is definitely key. Here’s one tool to consider: Bottr.me.
Why is Bottr.me the best storytelling tool?
Especially built for bloggers, creators, influencers, evangelists and anyone else who needs to maintain a voice online, Bottr.me is a free and powerful chat bot creation tool that allows anyone, anywhere to create a bot in one click.
Think of a chatbot as your smart digital twin who brings everything about you in one place, represents you and interacts with the world as you, 24/7 on all channels. They are being used to drive audience engagement strategies, amplify personal brand, save time answering repetitive or mundane questions, sell better and such, all with flair.
Interactive, intelligent way to get things done
Arguably, one of the main reasons why bloggers and every other busy professional love Bottr lies in its simplicity and efficiency.
A chatbot created on our platform tries to learn as much as it can about you from the blogs, social profiles or websites you connect to it. It creates questions in the form of suggestions based on your data for your audience to ask you.
You can further tweak or remove whatever it learns, add more information and suggestions all through one chat window.
Power of automation saves you time and effort
With an average blog visitor reading an article for 15 seconds or less, today, genuinely building authority in the blogging space goes hand in hand with engaging and interacting with your readers. Be it to exchange ideas, give insightful tips, listen to their pain points- engagement of some form is crucial to say the least.
Chatbots in this aspect act as guardian angels. They let you do what you love while working in the background on your behalf, 24×7.
Think of them as digital mini versions of yourself. They initiate smooth flowing conversations with readers, engage them beyond mere views and clicks and in turn save bloggers hours of effort. They mimic your style and tone of chatting every time it interacts with anyone on your behalf.
Added perk? Bots on Bottr can be connected to any platform or service you might use – from email and social networks to websites and blogs. This in turn brings all your conversations from all channels under one roof, into one interface.
Chatbots flaunt your content like no other
When there’s no dearth of well-crafted, aesthetically pleasing blogs online, just producing great content is not enough. Sure hours of slogging on theme templates, fonts, content layouts might pay off in the long run, taking a step back and weighing your options might be a good idea!
With the overwhelming competition on one hand and content consumption trends moving towards micro-blogging on the other, chatbots offer an indispensable solution for everyone who wants to be successful at blogging.
Chatbots let you showcase whatever you want from different forms of content to the services or products you sell in a visually appealing conversational format. More specifically, bots package your content into rich micro-content cards which can be tailored to display plain text, captivating images, videos, documents, drive traffic to another URL, you name it!
The best part? A chatbot widget installed on your blog can always ask a reader what exactly they’re looking for and respond with high-value user-specific results which in turns makes readers feel valued and ultimately stick around.
Helps you build deeper connections with live chat option
While we’re all for bots and for the right reasons, we do realise that there’s still two things they can’t do yet:
- Replace us humans completely
- Feel and show emotions.
As a blogger, you obviously want to network with authority bloggers and thought leaders in your niche space. Say, you’re looking to build long-term mutually beneficial relations with a fellow blogger or a brand has shown an interest in you with a aim to collaborate – your bot might be able to speak on your behalf but is not skilled enough to close the deal.
This is where the human – a.k.a. you – come in with live chat functionality. While your bot qualifies the people who reach out to you, you can take over and chat live with anyone you prefer.
Similar to a messenger platform where you toggle between offline and online. Except instead of an offline mode you have a bot taking care of all your interactions so you’re never actually offline and an online mode simply means you switching from bot mode to chat yourself.
Lets you stay in control with detailed analytics
As your chatbot learns to talk on your behalf, there’s no saying how chatty it will be or how many people are going to end up talking to it.
Bots on our platform come with their own in-depth analytics report which gives live insights into how people are interacting with it- from number of views, shares and messages exchanged to a list of questions your bot didn’t know how to answer. As a bot owner, one can further choose to view their bots activity on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
In practice, analytics gives you more statistical evidence of whether or not your chatbot is driving conversations and engagement on your website.
BOTtom line
At Bottr, we believe chatbots with a little bit of training work like charm. When it comes to holding one-on-one conversations to boost engagement and retention of readers, chatbots pull off what we like to call the perfect combination of content and conversation.
They care about your visitors as much if not more than you do. As a widget on your blog it has more potential than most engagement driving tools and strategies, especially because of the minimum effort and no coding involved.
Thousands of bloggers, influencers and professionals like Jennifer Lee and SEOSpecialist are already using bots to stand out of the crowd. What are you waiting for? Go ahead and try it for yourself by creating a bot now!
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This post was written by Abhimanyu Godara. Abhimanyu is among top 100 global thought leaders in the bots space and Founder/CEO of chat bot platform Bottr.me – one smart identity to do things, better and faster. Prior to this he worked with 40+ startups across product & marketing and studied at London School of Economics and IIT. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.