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Beside writing a good content, what makes people read your post? What makes them come back and read it again? What makes them leave a comment? What makes them stick longer or even retweet it?
In fact you may write the most interesting post, but you don’t understand why people never read you, or even take more than few second to stay on your blog?
Your blog must be lacking major attractive components, or too much of visual effects.
Here are few tips from my own experience:
Let the reader visualize the content of your post: Try to be creative with fonts, spaces, bold and italics. Underline the titles. Separate with paragraphs.
Blogs are, for some people, like drive through in the fast food chains; readers take only few seconds to decide if they will stay longer or leave your blog (you can check it out in your blog statistics, how long most people stay on your blog after they open it?)
Some people like me, read “diagonally”, I hope you know what the term ‘”to read diagonally” means, if you don’t, I’ll give you an example: Do you really think that one can finish reading a 200 page book in one night? Or in few hours? No matter how “light” the book is? Scientifically it is impossible, this person must be reading it diagonally. And it is way easier to read diagonally if the text is visually readable. Make your post a fast food for the eyes. Like in this post’s case, I bet you went through the titles highlighted in bold before you started reading the whole thing.
Write short posts: your post should not be longer than 50% of the page when your blog page opens. The reader rarely scrolls down to the end of the article no matter how interesting it is. Not to mention that people read blogs while at work, dealing with their own writing and research.
In my life I had to read volumes of legislation working as a lawyer and the least I want to do now, during my leisure time, is to read more boring long articles on people’s blog. If I want something serious I go to the source, to the library, but not to the blogs. So make it short!
Never take your readers for granted: Your readers are family; they are like your neighbors or your relative. You have to love them, because after all you are writing for them. Don’t assume if they stop by your post and take the time to leave a comment it is because you are the one and only shinning star on the web! No, you are not! No one is.
You have to respect them, write back and show your appreciation by turning the favor. How do you turn the favor? You go to their website and leave a comment. People who read your post, are equal to people who visit you at home in real life, and people who leave comments are like people who give you a present (unless they are terrorists and they throw a bomb at you). So it is like in real life, you should pay them a visit in return and leave a present!
Don’t overwhelm your home page with side stuff: Unless you are selling something, your blog should focus on your posts.
The field of vision in our head is way narrower than we think. When I see many pictures or texts on the side of a post, I loose concentration…maybe because I am a little bit ADHD (not really, I am joking) but aren’t we all to some degree?
Write from the heart: This sound like a cliché. I read this motto when I first started my blog, but I only learned what it meant when my hits scored only on articles I wrote with passion. The readers feel it, they know if you are just telling them BS or you are being genuine. They know if you are just filling space because you haven’t been blogging for a while or because you enjoyed writing about the subject. It is like when you stop at a cupcake shop just because it is famous and “in” you might never come back if it doesn’t taste good.
Not more than one post a day and, definitely more than one post a week: I have noticed from my blog that reading a blog go through few stages: readers look first at the blog and bookmark it (if they decide to read it later). After they read it, some of them come back few hours later to leave a comment. The process of reading a post takes at least 24 hours, if it is worth reading, or it will take few second to read it diagonally, or not at all. If you publish more than one post a day, people can be overwhelmed, they will not know which post to read and they will give up. Keep in mind that you are not the only blogger on the web and readers want to go to other blogs and read other posts.
Also, when you publish a new post, you are condemning the old one to being archived! Yes! Your old posts are history and will not be brought to light unless they are very interesting and you have good tags, that are easily detected by search engines. So give your posts some times under the sun, and let your readers savor them.
Finally, instead of hiring companies or spending time looking at your blog’s statistics (like I do) just enjoy blogging and people will enjoy reading you.
I have more tips and secrets to share but I am not telling anymore (joking)
I hope you enjoyed my post today, have a good one:)
