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Starting a blog can be fun and profitable. Your success, however, depends on your audience, and audience retention is all about strategy. Your primary task is to keep readers interested. They have to like what they see enough to want more, and then you have to help them make your blog a habit. A few mistakes from overzealous blogging strategists can leave great blogs with little to no audience, however.
Irregular Posts
The best customers make a habit of shopping at a particular store. You want your readers to get in the habit of reading your blog. The best way to develop a habit is to keep a regular schedule. It’s easy for readers to wander off to new sources of information if you take an extended break, and it’s even easier to miss updates if they occur randomly. Long-term readers need a steady schedule.
Excessive Product Placement
One of the best ways to make money through blogging is to use an established blog as a platform for paid ads. While many bloggers get custom ads for banners or side columns, many also give advertisers an entire blog post to sell their product. While these posts look like every other post at first glance, they are carefully designed to increase sales for a particular business or product. It’s seems like a reasonable money-making strategy. However, it ultimately makes your blog unreliable in the eyes of your readers. If you want to go this route, be sure ad posts are few and far between. Make sure they are also clearly marked so readers understand the bias and intention behind the information presented.
Post Length Issues
There’s nothing wrong with a variety of posts on your blog, but SEO rarely picks articles less than three hundred words. Five to eight hundred word articles tend to pack in more keywords, links, and useable information that readers crave. Short, hurried posts look short and hurried. A blog isn’t a newsletter, and readers usually want a little more thought than a simple report or update. Make sure the majority of your posts have meat for readers to sink their teeth into.
Link Spam Strategy
A good blog post backs itself up with helpful links. Excessive terminology is bad, but there’s nothing wrong with talking about static and dynamic stretches in a fitness blog. These terms would make great links. Using links to do nothing but link to paid product placements, or worse still, unrelated ads, annoys readers and undermines their confidence.
Blocks of Text
Even though readers like mid-length articles, they don’t like big paragraphs. While these paragraphs work well on paper, computer screens make them difficult to read. To help your readers focus on points and not strain their eyes, break your paragraphs into smaller sections. This is pleasing to the eye and easy to mentally digest.
There are many great ways to make a blog, but unfortunately there are also a lot of great ways to lose readers. Bad strategies will always hurt you in the end. Keep in mind that a blog is a kind of service. Serve your customers before potential advertisers. Make sure you generate fresh content regularly, and try to make it as easy as possible to read on a computer screen.