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Something I’ve been using lately is the “Rate my post” WordPress plugin (free).
It’s a pretty easy plugin to setup and add a star-rating option at the end of all your posts in a few clicks.
Here is what it looks like:
Readers can hover over the stars, select one, and done. You can require them to click again to confirm if you want. And even show up some social buttons to share it if they rated it highly. Nice.
I first heard about it from Gael Breton on one of the Authority Hacker podcast episodes and thought I’d give it a whirl because I love gathering feedback from my audience.
When you’re in a bit of a struggling stage, like I have been recently with my main site, getting closer to your readers is like gold dust.
If you can actually get your readers to give some small feedback – even just a quick star rating – it gives you some insight of what to focus your energies on.
Without it, you can kind of be stabbing in the dark with tasks like updating old articles just because they’re underperforming. Sometimes it’s better to listen to your most engaged readers by giving them an opportunity like this to rate your post.
Then you can easily see what posts people actually think are good and which they don’t.
I certainly get much more activity on this feedback widget than I ever have with comments. Commenting takes time and some effort and it’s always a rarely used feature. But a star rating takes literally one (or two) clicks.
And it works great on mobile, too!
I’m closing in on 50 ratings across my content so far – and it’s really helping me to see what I should move up the priority list for an update.
Sometimes there are articles which may not get a ton of traffic, and they swim under your radar. But those articles could be very engaging for your audience, and you might get a lot of ratings (positive or negative) on it.
You mightn’t otherwise know how important this topic is to your readers without something like this. Search volume/traffic isn’t the only metric.
If it’s an article with importance to your hardcore fans/readers, then putting extra effort into it could make it the kind of piece which creates a superfan for your site. The holy grail of traffic: actually being able to bring back that visitor again.
I haven’t been sponsored in any way to recommend this plugin, I just have genuinely enjoyed using it so far. You might want to try it out for yourself.
Here’s the link to Rate My Post (or you can just search for it from your WordPress plugin library)
Let me know how this plugin works out for you!