For bloggers, writing to a big audience is often something they aspire to do. Online of course, this often involves not just acquiring traffic, but keeping it!
Whether it’s SEO, social media networking, PPC or anything else driving your traffic, you need to find a way to keep that traffic coming back. Essentially, you have to turn your one time visitor into a regular reader.
Getting this nailed down takes time, effort, trial and error. But there are three mistakes that I’m pretty sure will drive your readers away every single time.
Bad Aesthetics
I’m not being shallow, really I’m not! But looks do matter. I’m not saying that your blog has to have model looks or anything or look like a super-professional design job, but it has to be readable. No matter how amazing the content on a site is, if it hurts my eyes to read it, I’m likely to click away quickly. Bright blue text on a yellow background is one such sin I came across recently. I don’t know whether it was designed to make the site stand out, or whether it was just a bit of fun… but it gave me a headache to read and so I didn’t bother trying!
Keep it crisp, clean and simple in terms of the text on a page.
Frequently Going off Topic
We all wander from our topic sometimes. It’s human nature! This one time, I was sitting in the garden talking to my friend about…. Oh hold up! I’m going off on one! But you get the idea. We all wander off our main topic from time to time but if you have a blog about cars, post about cars! Your readers and subscribers are coming to you because that’s what they want to read about. Your automobile fanatic fans are unlikely to keep reading if you’ve just posted the 6th post in as many days about your puppy.
While the occasional off topic post can freshen the blog, forgetting your focus entirely will drive away your core audience.
Over Advertising
Monetize your blog, by all means. However you advertise, though, you should make sure that advertising enhances your reader’s experience. If you have a blog about cars (to return to the previous example) why would you advertise a payday loans company’s services? It looks spammy and irrelevant.
Advertise for people whose products and services might actually be of interest to your general readership. This will be better for your readers, will be better for your advertisers and ultimately will be better for you.
Don’t overdo it either. If you have so much advertising on your site that it begins to detract from your content, you’re at risk of driving people to other blogs in search of a more content focused approach!
