Syed Balkhi — August 28, 2017 — August 28, 2017
You’ve populated your blog with a series of incredible, high-quality articles.
Days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months — but you still don’t have many people reading your articles.
Where did you go wrong?
If this sounds familiar, don’t feel bad because you’re not alone. Most beginning bloggers usually come across this issue.
Luckily, this problem can be fixed easily. We’re about to show you how.
Why should you care?
Developing a blog takes a lot of work. You can’t just set up your blog, publish some articles, and expect people to find your blog posts on their own.
You need to be able to make your blog discoverable and attract visitors to build an audience around your blog. Otherwise, all the effort you put into developing your blog will go to waste.
But why should you care whether or not people actually read your blog posts? Wouldn’t it be enough if you get visitors to just click on your ads?
Well, if your plan is to monetize your blog, this might work for a short while. However, if you want to build a profitable business with long-term goals, you should optimize your blog to improve readership.
How can you tell if people read your blog posts?
What if you still don’t know whether people read your blog posts or not? How can you track if people read your articles?
It’s easy. If you already have Google Analytics set up for your blog, you can use the analytics reports to check if people read your blog posts and how they spend time on your website.
Analyze the time visitors spent on specific webpages, and check your bounce rate to see how engaged your readers are. If the average visitor spends less than 15-20 seconds on a page, then that’s a red flag.
Tip: You can take things further by integrating a heatmap system to your blog to see how visitors interact with your blog posts. Crazy Egg is a great tool you can use to analyze the behavior of your visitors.
Don’t feel discouraged if the results aren’t where you’d like. You can start to improve things by checking if you’re making the following common mistakes.
1. You’re not promoting your content
It doesn’t matter how amazing your blog content really is if people can’t discover it. To make your blog discoverable, you have to promote it.
This includes consistently promoting your blog posts through your social media channels. If you have a marketing budget, you can buy Facebook ads and boost your posts for maximum reach.
Another way to build a loyal audience for your blog is to grow an email list. Email marketing is not only a great strategy to generate traffic, but also a great way to develop business relationships and sell your products.
Reports show that email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.
You can get your website visitors to join your email list using a tool like OptinMonster. OptinMonster helps you create website sign-up forms and collect email addresses that are automatically added to your email marketing account.
2. Your website isn’t optimized for search engines
While social media and email are two great ways to generate quick traffic, organic search traffic will likely be the number one source that will generate a continuous stream of traffic to your blog for free of charge.
That’s why it’s important that you optimize each and every blog post you create to rank well on search engines such as Google and Bing. Otherwise, Google won’t even notice your blog, let alone rank your blog posts higher in its search results.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a complicated subject. In fact, there are entire industries built around this process. But you don’t have to be an expert to optimize your blog for SEO.
Start by installing an SEO plugin, such as Yoast SEO, on your WordPress blog. Then optimize your blog posts with keywords to get higher rankings. Use Google Keyword Planner to research keywords.
3. Your website is too slow
Did you know that 40 percent of website visitors are likely to leave a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load?
How fast does your website load? Use Pingdom Speed Test tool to figure it out. See if your website loads faster than three seconds. The results page will give you a few suggestions on how to improve your website speed.
You can start by following these tips:
- Installing a caching plugin.
- Optimize and compress your blog post images.
- Consider moving to a faster web hosting provider.
4. You don’t have a content strategy
It’s important that you build your blog content around a specific niche to attract a target audience. Otherwise, if you randomly publish content on various topics, you will only end up confusing your readers and fail to build a specific audience for your blog.
It’s one of the many reasons why every blog needs a content strategy. A content strategy is a detailed plan on how, when, and what you publish on your blog.
Do some research and ask people what kind of topics they are most interested in. Then, create blog topics around those subjects. Create a schedule to publish your articles and stick to that schedule to consistently deliver content to your loyal audience.
5. Your blog posts look boring
Writing and publishing articles online is an art form of its own. Especially when it comes to blog posts, you need to make them entertaining enough to keep your readers engaged throughout the entire blog post.
If your blog posts are nothing but text with long paragraphs, then your readers will get bored quickly and leave your website halfway reading the blog post.
You need to follow proper formatting, include clever anecdotes, and use examples to illustrate your theories to make your blog posts more entertaining.
For example, it’s best to keep your paragraphs no more than three sentences long to improve readability. And you can build trust with your readers by mentioning research and case studies to back your theories.
Don’t be afraid to use lots of images in your blog posts. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Ready to bring in more readers to your blog?
Once you know what’s causing the problem, it’s easy to find solutions. Avoid these five common mistakes and you won’t have much trouble building a readership for your blog.
And remember, don’t be afraid to invest in your blog. You’ll be rewarded well in the long run.
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