Blog Tipz

You love writing. You love sharing your ideas with others, so you’ve become a blogger. Now that you have launched a blog, you want to create a community with others, delivering on the goals you have set.

One of the main problems with most bloggers today is that they constantly over-deliver. In many cases, the discussion contained in a post is much longer than it really needs to be. Even this post is longer than it needs to be. People live faster-paced lives than ever before but are still interested in content. Today, we’re absorbing more of it each day.

Starting a news site can be especially challenging – do you simply highlight the main news stories with a few short sentences about the main topic or write in-depth evaluations (more in the style of op-ed pieces than anything else). Obviously, it’s difficult to incorporate both of these post styles into your site unless you train your visitors to expect it.

Here’s a fact: a majority of the traffic coming to your site won’t read through one article, let alone all of them found on the main page. No matter how good of a writer you are, how “popular” you are, or whether millions of people have recommended one of your posts, this fact won’t change. You simply need to know how to deal with it.

1. Skip the Details

Details are great. Many people can ramble on and on about a topic for hours on end, and still have lots to talk about. Some of these same people begin a blog to write “novel” posts,which have thousands of words each (most posts are around five hundred words). While it is great to see the quantity, sometimes it is just better to get your point across in as little words as possible.

The most important aspect of this is that you don’t leave out any of the important details. Readers still want to be informed and they want to become knowledgeable. However, if you write a technology blog, you don’t need to explain all the details behind the acronyms with every post – there is a good chance your readers already know them if they are visiting the blog.

2. Clean up the Navigation

One of the main problems visitors have once arriving at your site is navigating through to read articles. For many bloggers, this isn’t too hard of a problem to solve, but more can usually be done to draw in visitors. Not only can you re-organize the navigation structure, but you can also optimize the site using A/B testing as well as heat maps, which show where users are clicking the most.

Integrating ads into your content can help increase revenue, but it won’t help with navigation – at all. Sometimes advertising that blends into your content inspires visitors to click away from your site – as they think it is links to other pages of your site – but then you lose a visitor that could have converted into a customer.

3. Provide a Reason for Visitors/Customers to Return

Announcing that you are writing a series of posts on a popular topic can drive more visitors to return to your site, but there are other ways that you can help draw visitors back to your site. Encourage users to subscribe to your site or follow your updates on the popular social networking sites.

What has separated some good online companies from the great ones? In most case, it comes down to support and the overall experience users have. If I have a bad experience at a site like Amazon, I am much less likely to shop there again, unless they can rectify the problem. I’m much more likely to visit a competing site or purchase the product directly from the product’s main site.

If you have killer content, you are essentially providing a service to your visitors. While you may give it away for free, there is a much higher chance you will convert them to customers/revenue if you can consistently deliver what they want.

4. Don’t Try Solving All Problems

Bloggers who want to “make it big” online will most likely fail. This isn’t the best way to begin your growth online – you’ll simply crash due to the amount of work. It’s more about time constraints than anything else. Obviously, if you are spending two hours each day writing new posts/content, then you’ll have a problem trying to expand this to ten blogs – you’ll spend less time focusing on some of the blogs.

Now, how does this relate to your visitors’ attention? Well, if you start branching out too far from your original focus, your visitors will notice this. Running a blog with a focus on one topic but then consistently delivering blog posts about another topic is one of the best ways to get your visitors to unsubscribe and never return to your site.

5. Be Structured, Plan for the Future

When you write on your blog, plan on having your content exist forever. Many bloggers do not do this. Instead, they blog as they go, creating bigger problems in the future. For example, instead of writing posts without paragraphs, some bloggers insist on not using any formatting or structure. Obviously, in the current time, it is bad, but in the future it will be worse. Imagine if these pages become ranked well in search engines – you’ll have a brand that is associated with junk.

Another good idea to keep your readers focused on your content is to use headings or a “snapshot” of what the post is about. These can be integrated into your blog fairly easily as long as you know HTML and spend some time to ensure your readers stay focused.

Conclusion

The key to maintaining your visitors’ attention is to set yourself apart from other bloggers, raising the bar for yourself, and have a product (content) that can stand up for itself. Don’t be mediocre – be something more and ensure that you can meet all your goals.

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