Whether you have a well-seasoned blog or have just published your first post, it can be confusing and demoralising when you don’t get the results you hoped for.
No shares. No comments. High bounce rate.
“What am I doing wrong?”
Growing and maintaining the success of a blog can be hard, it’s a competitive subsection of the internet – 2 million blog posts are published per day!
Generally, when your blog is falling on deaf ears and not leading to any engagement, you’re likely committing one of the three sins of blogging.
Get To The Point
People don’t go online to read beautiful literature; they pick up their favourite book or grab their Kindle. Your blog is not the place to show off your artistic flair, blogs are often skimmed through and used to find a quick ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to a query.
Users want to stumble across your blog post and be able to solve their problem quickly and easily. If there is no clear structure to your post and you make the reading experience a bad one, users won’t read on long enough to discover the answer they’re looking for – even if it’s right there in your next paragraph!
Content to remove:
- Irrelevant opinions that don’t add value to the content
- Filler content to pad out the main point of the post
- Generic information that everyone knows and doesn’t need to read again
- Large amounts of jargon
- Large blocks of text with no formatting
How to get to the point:
- Make your point and then stop. Don’t devalue your content by rambling.
- Write in short sentences
- If your paragraphs are starting to look too big, cut them in half
- Use the necessary amount of jargon for things to make sense, get rid of the rest
Get Rid Of The Superiority Complex
You may be the all-knowing, wise author of your blog with all the answers – but stay humble. No one likes to feel looked down on.
You’re (probably) writing your blog in order to help people who have issues or questions that you once had and now have the answers to – brilliant! Keep that in mind before tailing off on a story about how amazing you are, otherwise users will be rolling their eyes and bouncing right on over to your competitors’ blog.
How to write for actual people:
- Write as if you were talking to a friend
- Get rid of any language that will make users feel inferior
- Don’t over do it on the jargon
- Relate to them by explaining your past mistakes with this topic and how you overcame them
Know Your Audience
It doesn’t matter how well-written, well-researched and well-formatted your blog is if you’re singing to the wrong choir.
So many blogs have such a wide variety of topics covered that you can’t help but stop and think “who is actually reading this stuff?”. It’s unlikely that one person will be interested in baking, the latest digital marketing trends and holiday homes.
How to write for the audience you have:
- Look at what is performing best and create an audience persona
- Explore what your audience has the most questions about and write for them
- Be clear and concise, using resources and examples they can relate to i.e. a well-known name in your industry (much more professional and relevant than ‘my mate Paul from down the pub’}
Read our full guide on how to write great content.