Getting More Hits For Your Blog

Because the internet is free when it comes to publishing media of all sorts, there are a lot of people posting content out there, and unfortunately, most of it isn’t any good. If you are trying to get your content noticed amidst all the clutter, it can be difficult to get enough hits to maintain any kind of following. When your work is personal and creative, like a blog for instance, you take readership personally and want to grow your audience so you can spread your words. You can use online marketing and SEO strategies to get your blog’s link exposed to more people, but ultimately, if you really want a lot of hits that turn into regular readers, you need to have writing that stands out as being some of the best.

Quality Content

Having high quality content takes a few different skills. Obviously, your grammar and vocabulary will need to be impeccable. Otherwise, people won’t take your work seriously and won’t believe your advice or information to be reliable. It’s important to have the right kind of flow in your blog writing too. Using appropriate transitions between paragraphs and breaking up long sentences with shorter ones now and then can help your ideas flow together better.

The most important part of quality content though, has to do with your ideas. If you don’t have original ideas, then what’s stopping people from getting the same information somewhere else? People who are creative tend to be able to think outside the box and to approach common topics from a unique perspective. This is what you’ll want to try to do in order to produce quality content time and time again.

Personal Approach

Although many people write blogs in the same style as an article, their actual purpose is for a much more personal style. Blog is short for web log. Originally, these were online journals that took the place of traditional diaries and were meant to be shared. Compared to all the informational content on the web, this style was refreshing and caught on quickly. The blog became a great way for people to vent about technology and to share their experiences in a digital format.

Of course, since then, they have grown to encompass many different topics and styles, but those that have the biggest readership tend to be those that have kept with the personal approach. You can certainly talk about article worthy topics like news, products, trends, etc., but you should remember that people are there to read your opinion, your thoughts, your arguments, etc. Try to write about topics that stir you emotionally or excite you in some way. That will make them easier to write about from a personal perspective and more likely to evoke that same emotion in your audience.

 

Unique Voice

Normally, when someone writes from a personal perspective, it’s easy for readers to hear their voice. The voice of a writer often stems from their perspective, but when it comes to expert writers, it is combined with the craft of their discipline. They will use word choice, sentence structure, paragraph breaks, and even punctuation to embed a voice in their writing that makes it all their own. Some writers enjoy playing with puns, metaphors, and tongue-in-cheek clichés in their writing, while others like to use alliteration, repetition, and rhythm. When done properly, you should see the voice threaded throughout the entire blog, so that when you finish reading it, you feel like you just finished a conversation or personal, yet entertaining, letter from someone you know very well.

Digestible Length

When you write a blog, it’s important to remember that you are not writing a book, or even a researched article. You are writing a short entry in yet another installment of your very public web log. While you may be able to ramble on for pages about a topic you are passionate about, your readers will not have the patience to follow you there. Most readers skim the content they find on the internet, but if your blog is good enough and short enough, you might just get their full attention with a close reading. If readers can see the end of the blog when they first click to the page, that’s a good sign.

If they have to scroll down to finish it though, they may feel that it’s too long and isn’t worth their time. Try to keep your blogs to an easily digestible 500 words or less. If you must go longer, break it up into smaller sections using enticing subheadings to keep them curious about what’s coming up next. The basic rule of thumb here is, if you’re going to use up people’s time, be sure you’re not wasting it with something insignificant or unnecessarily long.

Instant Gratification

Ultimately, the reason people read a blog in the first place is because they hope to get something out of it. If you are simply rambling on about nothing important with no thought to what it provides your readers, then you probably won’t be seeing an increase in hits anytime soon. Your blog should give readers something they can immediately use. Our modern culture is all about instant gratification. That means your blog should entertain them, teach them something useful, inspire them to do something, or move them to ponder. If you can give them at least one of these things every time you write, you should have no trouble getting more hits for your blog, and consequently, a reason to keep writing.