Building Anticipation On Your Blog
How would you like to increase the number of comments on your blog?
Do you want to see the number of RSS subscribers skyrocket?
Or maybe you are planning a blog contest and you want to see a huge response from your readers.
The common theme among these goals is the idea of participation.
You want your readers to participate by sharing their voice in the form of comments. You want to encourage new visitors to participate on your blog by subscribing to your RSS feed. You want your readers to participate in your contest and share the contest with their readers.
Do you want to know how to go about encouraging this participation?
Now that you are nodding your head in agreement, let me share one word that will put you on the path to more participation.
Anticipation.
By building a sense of anticipation among your readers, you will find that you are able to accomplish your goal of increasing participation.
Naturally this leads to the question of how you go about building anticipation on your blog.
Rather than go into a long explanation of how to build anticipation, I thought it would be worthwhile to point you towards a few people that have clearly grasped the ability to build anticipation.
CopyBlogger has discussed one simple way to generate more comments.
Problogger shared a secret to finding new subscribers for your blog.
If you want to learn how to build anticipation for an upcoming contest…well, you’ll just have to come back tomorrow! 
There are a couple of examples of building anticipation just within this post! I can’t wait to find out how to master this art and see my feed count and comments skyrocket!
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I knew that was coming. How to do so-and-so…Come back tomorrow to find out. This upcoming contest better be good.
Intrigued! Will definitely come tomorrow to find out what a special thing you have invented:)
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You are learning evil ways from some very experienced bloggers. You have got me salivating.
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The two blogs you link to are quite supportive of the anticipation theory. Problogger seemed to do really well with it, as when he started concentrating on the future (as he so boldly put it), his subscribers skyrocketed. I suppose I’ll try to figure out a way to do this too.
I know how to build anticipation. All you have to do is not finish your
what? finish your what?? oooo, the cliffhanger has me on the edge of my seat! :p
Very nice Derek! I’ll be back
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You implement these techniques well on your blog. You keep me coming back for more.
thanks again for the info. i learn so much by coming back to your blog.
Thanks for the links, that’ll be useful. My blog is going through a bit of a “dry spell” at the moment, so it’s always nice to learn new tricks
I think you are right about the anticipation factor helping gain subscribers/regular readers…doing a series of posts has been one effective thing I have tried … bribing them with money & entrecard credits help too
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Ahh, but your cunning plan did not work Derek. I have been busy of late so saw the contest before this post. Is that called anti-anticipation ?
The In-Series plugin for Wordpress is a great way to get reader anticipation and subscription:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/in-series/
One of the best anticipation tips (but also the biggest waste of time) is to make a post about Google PR updates
I must say looking back at our earlier posts it seems that your comment number are up greatly.
Correct, average comments per post has certainly been improving compared to earlier posts. The additional dialog has been fantastic.