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

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).

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.