Okay, maybe that’s a little unfair. Maybe it’s not no-one. We’re sure your mum and the cat are avid readers of your blog. But if you’d really like a targeted audience who can’t wait to hear what you have to say – especially if you’d like to make some money from your blog – then perhaps you need a little help. In this article we offer 6 reasons why no-one is reading your blog and what to do about it.
1. Poor site design
If your site attempts to cover every colour of the rainbow, and shades in between, with all the fonts you like thrown in, and you have an aversion to leaving some white space so people can focus, you’re going to put people off before they even read a word.
Keep your design simple, clean and uncluttered, make sure your site leads the reader clearly through what you want them to do, whether it is to read your blog, sign up to your newsletter or buy a product.
2. Boring content
With so many other blogs around, you need to write fabulously helpful content with bags of personality.
Do your research, know your subject and your audience and write what you know your audience wants. But don’t just write for SEO to please Google Bot. Add some bounce to your copy, show off your personality and let people get to know you.
3. Headlines that don’t grab your readers
Internet attention spans are notoriously short, and with all the banner ads, auto-play videos, social media sites and literally millions of other websites out there, you’re trying to get attention in a crowded world, so you’ve got to give people a reason to stop what they’re doing and read.
That starts with a strong, eye-catching headline that draws your audience in. If you need help with that, CoSchedule have a brilliant headline analyser that can test your titles and email subject lines for you.
4. Lack of focus
Just because you want to write about Star Wars, chocolate and mechanical engineering, it doesn’t mean your audience will follow you.
Pick a subject for your blog and focus what you write on that. You’ll build an audience much faster if you write on just one area or niche.
5. Poor formatting
Blogs really pop when they use great images, bullet points, short paragraphs and headlines to break up the text. While die-hard fans of your subject may keep ploughing through your epic wall of copy, most people will be put off and click away.
Try to keep your paragraphs to no more than three or four lines to make your posts easy to read.
6. You’re not making an effort to get traffic
“Build it and they will come” is only true in movies. Get out there on social media and share your blog posts, build relationships with other bloggers in your field, comment helpfully on other peoples’ blogs, guest post, ensure your site is optimised for the search engines and do everything you can to build an audience and get traffic to your posts.
If your site and your posts are full of great content that’s highly targeted to your audience, and you’re actively building relationships and attracting traffic, you will get active, engaged readers who are more than happy to stick around.
Why no-one is reading your blog – where to find out more
If it’s all too much and you don’t have the time to write your own blogs, why not ask us to do it for you? We can write from 1 to 8 blog articles per month for your website, whatever your industry, starting from the very reasonable price of only £50 per article. Read more about our blog article writing service here and then get in touch with us to discuss how we can help.