If you’re a blogger suffering from a lack of healthy traffic to your site, you might want to revisit your previously posted content and ask yourself: is this material interesting?
You can implement all the SEO tricks in the book and design the most impressive homepage, but the fact remains that readers won’t visit your site if you don’t have any interesting or compelling to say. Compare any successful blog with a newly started blog and you’ll notice the difference in content right away. New bloggers tend to feature posts on a scattering of subjects, hoping that they’ll chance upon a story or an angle that will increase their traffic.
If you’re casting about for a way to draw new readers, maybe it’s time that you tried finding your blogging voice. Here are some basic guidelines that might help you strengthen your content so as to make it more appealing to new readers.
Decide on a topic and stick to it
Some bloggers suffer from an inability to focus on one subject, preferring to write on a host of issues in hopes that one will connect with readers. But the truth is that readers who stumble upon blogs with no clear central theme will likely click away from the site for something more cohesive. Bloggers who want to improve their content must choose a single topic—preferably a topic that you know a great deal about and one that you feel comfortable writing on—and write about that one topic until they start to make headway.
Bloggers might jump from topic to topic out of impatience, approaching any subject with the hope that it will deliver the writer to blogger stardom. However bloggers don’t become celebrities and million-page-view hits overnight; it takes patience and dedication to jettison a blog from its humble beginnings.
Choose a topic that continually interests you as a blogger. You can narrow the field by taking note of your browsing habits: what sites do you typically frequent? What news stories draw your attention the most? Which bloggers do you idolize? Asking yourself these questions could help you determine what topic would best suit you.
Once you’ve decided the topic, write to your target audience
For the sake of example, let’s say that you chose to focus on blogging about coffee. You have posts planned on every aspect of coffee: cultivation of the beans, production and packaging of the product, local coffee shops, different varieties of beans, etc. You have the subject matter down, now you just need to worry about how you convey the subject to your audience.
If you’re writing about coffee, you want to pay attention to pertinent details that’ll attract interested readers. You’d want to share compelling news stories about the fluctuations in coffee prices, where to shop to get the highest quality beans, brands to avoid, and so on. You’re writing to a readership visiting your site because they share you fascination for coffee, so treat them as equals—don’t write down to your readers, write to them as fellow enthusiasts.
Edit, edit, edit
When you’ve zeroed in on the subject matter and tone of your blog, after you’ve written a piece that likeminded readers could relate to, make sure that you give your work a final once-over before publishing it. Sometimes the only difference between a good and great blogger is the ability to edit one’s work. Read your work to yourself, and then read it again out loud to make sure that everything you’ve typed sounds natural and makes logical sense. It’ll only take a few minutes to read through and edit your work, and the payoff is certainly worth the effort. You don’t want misspelled words and clunky sentences littering your posts, it’ll just give readers another reason not to check out your blog.