So, you’ve spent the time and effort and finally created your very own blog … but no-one’s reading it. This can be hugely demotivating, especially if you’re the type of blogger that pours a lot of time and energy into each post. However, just because your blog is going unread doesn’t mean that you should give it up – you may simply need to make some tweaks. Here are some reasons why you may not be getting any readers and what you can do to change this.
Your content is too focused on you
There’s nothing wrong with a blog being a personal account of your life. However, your content needs to be beneficial to other people in some way too. Most people read blogs to learn something, on top of being entertained. They read travel blogs to learn about interesting places, they read music blogs to discover new music and they read parenting blogs for parenting tips. Controversial opinions can be engaging too, because they help readers understand a different point of view, which can make people intrigued. If you want your content to be engaging, you need to always be offering something to the reader – no-one is going to read about your day-to-day life if it has no benefit for them.
Your content is too promotional
If you’re running a blog for business purposes or you accept promotional content from third parties, be careful of letting your content become too promotional. This content doesn’t intrigue people as it’s essentially an advert. Try to work in promotional content whilst offering genuine unbiased advice. If you’re writing blog posts on a real estate site, give people tips for packing when moving and tips on how to find a good mortgage.
Your content is inconsistent
There has to be some running theme to your blog, otherwise it can strike readers as too messy and put people off. Readers may be looking for specific content that they can follow – if you keep straying from this, they’ll lose interest in your blog. Consider creating categories if you want to cover multiple topics, or keep to one theme. Try to find a writing voice that is consistent too – if you’re constantly switching between different writing styles this will seem jarring to your readers. Similarly stick to the same fonts and colours so that your blog doesn’t feel too messy.
Your blog is difficult to navigate
Difficult navigation can also put off your readers. There should be a clear navigation bar and ideally a search bar too – don’t just rely on a list of posts in a sidebar. Have an easy way of returning to the homepage can be useful too, either as a button or a header in the navigation bar. If you’re using WordPress or Blogger, you can usually make use of plug-ins to adds these navigation bars and search bars. You could even use a company like UX 4Sight to improve your navigation by creating clearer navigation and creating a cleaner interface. Often simply being too cluttered can make a sight hard to navigate.
Your blog is difficult to read
A bad choice of fonts and colours could make your blog difficult to read. You should be careful of using images as backgrounds as these can often create colour clashes. It’s possible you may be able to darken or blur the image to make text more salient, although you may be better off having a blck colour as a background. Sites like Visme have some great tips on colour schemes worth looking into. As for fonts, try to stick to clear ones like Arial and Calibri. You can be a little more imaginative with headers, so long as they’re big enough for the font to be read.
Your blog takes too long to load
A slow loading blog could put a lot of visitors off too. This can sometimes be the result of using too many plug-ins or having too many images to load. Reducing these plug-ins and images could help your blog to load faster, but could negatively effect the visual impact of your blog. You could be better off seeking a new hosting company. The likes of DreamHost are renowned for delivering fast loading times. Having a programmer design your website from scratch could also make your website faster than having to rely on plug-ins.
You’re not optimising search engines
If you’re not getting any initial traffic, it could be a case of not using SEO tactics. Search engine optimisation can make your website rank higher on search engines like Google and Bing. Using keywords strategically is one way of improving your search engine rankings, but there are many other tactics too. Using hyperlinks is one such method – both internal hyperlinks leading to other pages on your blog and hyperlinks leading to other people’s sites. Posting regular content can also keep you at the top of search engines.
You’re not making use of social media
Many readers use social media to keep updated on new blog posts. If you haven’t got social media channels for your blog, this could be the cause of your low traffic. Each time you create a new post, make sure that you also post a link to it on Facebook and Twitter. Tools like Buffer can help to automatically post new content to social media every time it’s published (you can also use these tools to schedule posts for a certain time). Social media can also be used to remind people of previous content – you can repost links to prior blog posts throughout the year to take advantage of new readers. Get people to follow your blog on social media by inviting all your friends to follow your pages and by linking to social media on your blog (you can use social media plug-ins that can allow people to follow you on the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google Plus with the click of a button.
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