Are you familiar with the Bandwagon Effect in psychology?
What if I told you that there was one way to increase all your stats–your comments, your page views, and your follower counts?
There is one way to do that which is based on psychology.
It’s called The Bandwagon Effect. Marketers use it all the time.
This post will tell you 9 ways to take advantage of it.
Simply put, the bandwagon effect is the label for “the phenomenon of a popular trend continuing to gain popularity”.*
According to Neil Patel, people like to simplify their decisions by trusting the crowd. If a ton of people think something is good, it probably is.
You can use the bandwagon effect to increase all your blogging stats. Other blogging advice articles explain how to write quality posts and have an appealing blog in order to attract readers. This article assumes you have strong writing and an engaging site but not enough readers to engage with.
How to Get Visitors to Your Site Using the Bandwagon Effect
- Make a Facebook page for your blog, and invite everyone you know to like it. I have a Facebook page for my blog, but I never understood the appeal. In the year I’ve been blogging, I keep getting invitations to “like” bloggers’ Facebook fan pages. People who have businesses as well as blogs have pages for those things. People are sent invitations. In order to support their friend or relative, they agree to “like”. The result is the number of likes rises. If that many people like the blog, the readers think, it must be good, and blog traffic increases from the overflow onto the blog.
- Get followers from Pinterest. Most people will follow you back. It will be a way for you to get your numbers up. How to Quintuple Your Page Views Using Pinterest explains how I successfully followed these instructions. My experience is not unique.
- Join Facebook groups. that will follow you across your social media and “like”your Facebook page. If you are looking to take advantage of the bandwagon effect by raising your numbers, I recommend the Grow Your Blog Facebook group.
- Join other Facebook groups. that will increase your comment count. Bloggers Rule SEO is designed for doing that. It focuses on increasing your search engine optimization as well.
- Join Follow to Follow Directories. According to Michael Rios, he and I are the only two people with Follow to Follow Directories. All you need do is request access to have an instant subscriber increase. Here is the link to Michael’s Follow to Follow Directory, and here is the link to my Follow to Follow Directory.
- Use Twitter. Neil Patel discusses the importance of asking people on Twitter to follow you. He reported a study which found that if you spell out the words “Please Retweet,” you are more likely to get your links shared on Twitter than any other Call to Action you could put in your link.
- WordPress.com bloggers should have publicize on. Then, their follower count will include all their social media, and the number will look inflated.
- Ask your readers to help share. Ask them to share your post at the end of the article.
- Ask your readers to comment. According to Neil Patel, “The truth is the hardest comments to get are the first few dozen. Once people see those, they are more eager to contribute their opinions as well.” End your post with a strong call to action. If you end with an open-ended question, people will not only engage with you, they might engage with each other. According to Patel, “If you have those initial 5-10 comments and also encourage new comments, you’d be surprised to see how quickly people will jump on the bandwagon.”
Conclusion: How to Capitalize on the Bandwagon effect
In conclusion, the greater the number of people who believe in something, the more credibility it seems to gain, whether it has any basis in fact or not.
A reader read my interview with 15 blogging experts. I asked them what characterizes blogs they follow. I thought my readers could put those characteristics into their blogs in order to get followers too. The reader astutely observed that the influencers only like successful blogs.
I hope you realize the Bandwagon Effect helps you make more sales. If people believe something is popular, they want it too, even for a cost.
By following the advice in this post, your blog will have such high numbers of followers and commenters, it will look successful. Then, once people are at your site and realize how helpful it is, it can actually be successful.
I realize the bandwagon effect is deceptive. However, if someone genuinely has a weak blog, even if people check it out due to the high numbers of comments, likes, and followers, they won’t stick around for very long anyway.
There is an applicable line from the song, I’m the Greatest Star from the musical Funny Girl. The lyric goes, “I’m the greatest star; I am by far, but no one knows it.”
You know you write quality blog posts. If you follow the band wagon technique, people will flock to your articles and your blog, and then they can discover how beneficial your information really is.
Readers, if you feel the bandwagon technique is a good strategy for bloggers that can’t get attention to their blogs, please share.
What is your opinion? Do you feel the band wagon could help bloggers struggling to get their numbers up? On the other hand, do you feel that because it “pads” the numbers, it is deceptive and want to avoid trying it? I look forward to your views.
Related Post:
How to Quickly Get Comments on Your Blog
Sources:
Dictionary.com*
https://www.quicksprout.com/2015/10/19/6-psychological-principles-that-influence-reader-loyalty/
www.sandboxadvisors.com/work-performance-management/biases-decisions
