If you subscribe to RSS feeds from many blogs, you may find that you don’t read every post, or read the post word-for-word. If you are a blog owner, you should know that you want to try and avoid this, and ensure your readers read all your posts word-for-word. So how do you go about this? Let’s find out.
Don’t Write Low Impact Posts
Unless you’re a famous celebrity, people don’t want to read about what you did for the day, or what you had for breakfast. These posts are worthless to the readers, and will be mostly skipped. By writing these posts, it will tend to make people unsubscribe from your blog as they are not receiving useful information.
Make Your Posts Useful
People don’t want to read things that aren’t useful to them, so try not to write too many off-topic posts. Make sure you write posts that users will gain something out of it. Write something for them to say, “Hey, that’s interesting”.
Create A Complete Guide
If you are writing a ‘How To’ post, don’t write a quick guide for it. Explain each step in detail, and use a lot of images to support your instructions. You have to pretend that your readers do not know anything about the topic. Depending on the guide you are writing, break it down into pages (as this can improve your bounce rate) and use Chapters. For example, have a look at the Complete Wave Guide written by Gina Trapani and Adam Pash from Lifehacker. Although this guide is big enough to be an eBook, you still get the general idea. Another good example for how you should write guides is Instructables. Take particular note about how many pages you have to click to read the whole instruction, and how the steps are broken down.
Write A Post Series
Writing a post series is a good marketing tactic for your blog to get your readers coming back. However, make sure you stick to a regular schedule and post once a day so readers don’t leave because they are sick of wasting their time because nothing new is on your blog.
Create An Appropriate Title
Titles are the most important part of getting a reader to click on your link and read your post. By having a title that has nothing to do with a post, the reader will just ignore it. If you have a title that explains exactly what the post is about, the reader will click it and read it. For example, if you are writing a review about a new laptop, a bad title that people will not read will be “Look what I just purchased”. Unless people have an interest in your life and what you purchased, no one will read it. However, if your title is “Review of the Median Akoya E1210 Netbook”, people who are looking at netbooks will most likely read it.
Think About Controversial Topics
Being controversial in your posts may hurt your reputation, so be very careful as to what you say. To have an impact on your readers about controversial topics, don’t lead on to strong about the topic. Present the topic a different way, or in a way that people haven’t noticed like that.
Be Short And To The Point
Posts don’t always have to be long. Short, and to the point is another way readers can be impacted by your post. If you have a brilliant idea or a thought, if written in the right way, it can spread quite a bit. Long posts can often have the reader drift off, especially if it is boring for them, and they already read quite a lot. If you have a lot of links in your article, they may often click on one and read that first, before coming back (or forgetting) to read the rest of the post.
Be Memorable
If your readers remember your post, you have achieved your goal of impacting your readers. If you think back through your life, you won’t remember every single thing that you have done, but you will remember certain scenes of your past. This could be your favourite Christmas when you were a child, or something horrific like watching your loved-one pass away. What ever it was, it impacted you and you will remember it for the rest of your life.
You have to try and do the same with your writing. You might want to do something bold and courageous that all your readers would remember. If you are producing a video, you may want to include something in the background, just like in this video. Many people would remember this video for a long time if they have watched it.
List Excellent Resources
If you list excellent resources that your readers are interested it, it will save them hours and hours searching for the content on the internet. By creating lists of items, these posts can be a very useful to all your readers, as all the information is a few clicks away.
Write About New Idea’s
Saying the same thing over and over in different ways will make your readers get bored. So post something new or extreme to keep your readers interested. Look how much publicity the Apply iPad received as that was a new idea; a never seen before device.
Take New Angles
If you struggling to come up with new idea’s, try and take a previous idea’s, but add a new angle to it. Take blogging for example. Posts were often very long and short posts just didn’t quite fit in. Then Twitter came along and the microblogging took off. Microblogging is a new angle of conventional blogging.
Another example could be that you’re covering the topic of the iPad. Most blogs would write a review on it, but by brave and write about why it sucks, or why the iPad is a larger version of the iPhone.
Write Fewer, More Detailed Posts
Very large blogs can publish 10 or more posts per day, but if you are the only one blogging on your website, you may find it will be hard to write this many posts. You then might want to write fewer, but more detailed posts once a day, rather then publish 3 smaller posts.
Write More, Less Detailed Posts
The same can be said the other way. Shorter posts, to the point, and lots of them, can entice your readers. You just have to find an equal balance that you like writing and your readers like reading.
If you follow these simple 13 simple tips, you will have a greater impact on your readers. Do you have any tips to how you can have an impact on your readers? Please share with everybody in the comments.
