What can I ask my readers to help me and how?

Question

I have a growing non-fiction blog about challenging existing dogmas in my culture, and it has been attracting a good amount of readers. However its growth is still not optimal, as they just read or want to meet me, not really commit to help me. I don't want to be greedy or arrogant, but I think I can ask them if they can help me in some tasks, so that they can see the project growing, and I can have time to focus on writing new articles. I sincerely consider me as being overloaded right now. The tasks they may help includes:

• Share it to other potential readers, either on their Facebook wall or via chat
• Help me engage with other readers: manage pages, posts, comments
• Write emails to other targets: publishers, people they don't know personally but probably see its importance in their work

My questions are:

1. Is this reasonable?
2. How should I approach them?

Related: What to ask next when people tell me that my article is excellent?

Answer 1

Ask them for topic suggestions directly.

Ask your audience what things they have noticed and what they feel strongly about.

Make it a point to base your posts around reader suggestions and then you can save your own topics for times when views start to drop.

You can also make follow-up articles by asking about how they feel about the specific topic you are writing about and then framing responses like a discussion and evolution of thoughts on the topic.

Asking your readers about how they deal with the topic and then expand on that in a follow-up post.

Unfortunately, these are probably pretty generic sounding ways to do things, but that's because they have kind of just been proven to work for most people. May not bee what you need to maximize following, but should help to keep the audience involved somewhat.

Answer 2

Ask them for sources or documentation!

Since your topic can be considered as niche and pretty advanced, your target demographic is already made of well-cultured "colleagues". They might be themselves teachers and students of your culture's dogmas, and may have access to a wealth of documents, memoirs and books that might help you deepen your own knowledge and send you towards new topics for new blog articles - hence creating a vertuous circle.