Why Hold A Reader Survey?

The end of a year is always a time for reflection and planning for the new year ahead so it’s the perfect time to hold a survey for your readers. Holding a survey is useful to help you plan for the future – and to see what people want to see more of (and alternatively, what features you can feel safe to drop). The results might surprise you! It also can help draw out those readers who lurk and don’t normally comment – their opinion is just as important as those who comment all the time!

How?

We’ve covered how to use Google Forms and our new favourite, Typeform previously, but there are so many other ways, like using a WordPress plugin to build your survey, or sites like Survey Monkey and Wufoo. You could even use the comments section of your blog post! It’s probably a good idea to work out what you want to ask your readers first to work out which way is going to be best to ask your readers. You could also incorporate a giveaway into the survey to encourage people to take part where people can enter if they complete the survey and leave their email address.

What?

You’ll need to work out what you want from a blog survey first before you decide on the questions – there are so many things to ask your readers which are obviously dependent on your blog needs, but here are a few ideas…

Basics

• Name
• Gender
• Age group
• Location
• E-mail (with some survey sites, you can automatically add the e-mail address to your Mailchimp newsletter list)
• Blog URL (a great way to find new blogs to read!

Other information about the reader…

• Which social networks do you use? (This could help you work out what to focus on)
• What are your favourite blogs to read?
• What mobile device(s) do you own?

History with the site

• How long have you been reading the site?
• How did you find the site?
• What are your favourite posts/blog series?
• What are your least favourite posts to read?
• How often do you visit the site?
• How often do you check for new posts?
• How do you subscribe to the site?
• How long have you been reading the site?
• What’s your favourite post ever/this year?

Future of the site

• What do you enjoy about the site?
• What would you like to see more of/less of?
• How do you feel about advertising?
• How do you feel about other forms of monetisation?
• Would you be interested in more YouTube videos/a message board/(other feature you’ve been thinking about doing!)

Specifically…

If you’ve been thinking about launching other products (perhaps an ebook?), then you could use a section to ask questions for market research reasons! For example, if you were considering an ebook, then here are some types of questions you could ask:

• How often do you buy ebooks?
• How do you read ebooks – Kindle, iBooks, Nook, etc?
• How much do you consider a reasonable price for an ebook?

At the end, you could include a larger text box to allow your readers to write a more detailed note to you

What To Do Afterwards?

Once you’ve gained a reasonable amount of responses (or after a certain period) then you can look at the responses and see what the trends are. With things like Typeform, then some of the trends can be summed up for you – things like the answers to the multiple choice questions, etc. A survey is only going to be useful if you use the data from it to achieve your original aim – whether that’s to find out what to do next, or what to stop doing, then make sure that you do it!

If you haven’t already, please do check out our survey!