Confessions of a Six Figure Professional Blogger

How To Set Up A Poll With Wordpress [And Why]

December 7, 2009 | Blogging

As bloggers, we want our readers to be involved with our blog. Blogging is not a one-way interaction.

Typically, most bloggers view comments as the main sign of involvement. A comment is certainly a sign of high involvement because it takes time to write a comment (a decent one anyway).

Picture 30 The reality is, though, that most of your blog readers will be lurkers. They are lazy and they won’t post comments because (a) they are too lazy, and (b) they have nothing all that important to add to the conversation.

Don’t just accept this fact and move on. You need involvement devices on your blog.

Which brings me to the use of polls.

Why A Poll?

A poll is an involvement device for your blog with an insanely low barrier to entry. With two clicks, a reader can chime in. No typing necessary.

By increasing involvement via polls, you can baby-step people into comments as well. It builds up a habit of interaction with your blog and this is useful in everything you do.

Lastly, you can use a poll to gain useful feedback from your audience which you can then use to tailor future content. You could even use the information for planning products to sell on your blog.


How To Install A Poll

It is a simple plug-in called WP-Polls.

This is a killer plug-in. It allows you to run multiple polls on your blog. You can easily embed your polls into your sidebar, but with a simple little tag you can even put polls onto your posts and pages. The plug-in also supports the display of poll archives. It uses AJAX to interact with the code, which allows the poll and results display to work easily wherever you embed the poll. The use of AJAX is also helpful for bloggers using WP-Super Cache because the results will not be cached.

Using The Poll System

Over on PCMech (which is where I’m using the plug-in), we’re going to swap out the poll with a new one roughly every week.

The poll is embedded into the sidebar, but each week we will also have a dedicated post on the blog with the post embedded. The reason we do this is to bring more attention to the poll. Likely, we will also mention the poll of the week in the site’s weekly newsletter.

Over time, the goal is to increase user involvement, provide lead-in’s to potential content, as well as to learn more about the audience.

I suggest you give this a try on your blog. You WANT people involved with your blog in one way, shape or form. Make it easy and give them options.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

  1. 11 Awesome Wordpress Plug-In’s You’ve Probably Never Heard Of
  2. How I Converted a Non-Blog Site to Wordpress
  3. Wordpress EasyFeeds Plug-In
  4. Setting up a Gallery with Wordpress
  5. Wordpress Theme Switch – Solved?

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  • David:

    Thanks for the tip. It's one I will implement immediately. It has me thinking. There really are a million ways to enhance your blog, make it more SEO, make it more engaging. For the new blogger, aside from consistantly adding content to your blog, what are the cornerstone techniques, plugins and such that must be mastered in order to really get in the game and generate attention?

    Trish
    www.yourhomebusinessroadmap.com
  • Haven't tried to use polls on my site but i'm sure it will sure add to awareness of your readers and you too will know what's on your readers' minds
  • If you had a poll on whether or not I planned on using polls in my future posts after reading this, I might have voted. :)

    Deb
  • And again, it really inspires me, thanks. I had polls on my blog and then I just removed them. Now, I see why I needed them. :-)
  • This old plugin can be, unfortunately, manipulated. DO NOT use it for important things, as one can trick it and vote multiple times.
  • Batman
    Unfortunately, not at a point where I can use plug ins yet....
  • I've actually tried a few polls on some of my blogs, but they never really did all that well. Most of the comments I get I get through interacting with others which I believe is more personal than having a poll.

    Having said that polls are a great way to give people a quick representation of how people feel about any given topic and should be use to accentuate the comments left on a post.
  • As usual, great post. I am glad I subscribed.
  • I'm glad you did, too. Thanks. :-)
  • Super ideas, David. I recently did a sort of mini-poll on Twitter, just asking about the habits of readers: did they comment on the blog, tweet/retweet & did they actually read the post before tweeting the link. Interesting results. I posted them on my blog if you want to check it out.

    I've been trying to increase comments on my blog so I've been offering a Google Wave invite to the top couple commentators each week. Still hasn't improved much, and now that Wave has opened up to 1mil people, well...

    I like the idea of the poll and how you use it as content everywhere including your newsletter. I'm always trying to think of what else I can offer in mine. Thanks for all your sweet tips, as usual!
  • My weekly posts have turned into a great addition to my site. It does get a lot of people clicking on the site, plus I've had a lot of people comment for the first time on the blog posts that I write to go along with the polls.

    The only thing that I wish wp-polls had was a way to add a link to the corresponding blog post from the sidebar widget.
  • Hey David,

    Fantastic post again buddy. I really like the concept of baby stepping your readers into involvement. Never really thought of it that way. I've actually never used polls, but after reading this am going to start. Thanks for another fantastic post.

    Shannon
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