Building a great blog is hard work. It takes hundreds of hours of your time and an unrivalled dedication to your subject. But what if, after all of that hard work, no one ever visits your blog? Or worse, you get streams of traffic but none ever stays or engages?
After all, you write for the outside world and you want them to hear you. Whatever your reason for starting and maintaining your blog, it can be disheartening to feel you have worked for nothing. But don’t worry. There are some very common reasons why people aren’t reading your blog and this article will help you address common blog issues and allow you to enjoy a growing readership.
1. They Can’t Find It
The single most common reason for lack of traffic to your blog is that it isn’t being found by your target readers. Whatever the subject of your blog, you need to actively promote it to and ensure that you optimize it to the hilt so search engines can pick it up.
There are a huge number of ways you can promote your blog, all of which will encourage the search engines to pick up your blog too. Social media, guest blogging and forum posting are all valid and successful methods of enticing readers to your blog. Onsite optimization, keywords and fresh content all help you rank more easily in the search engine results.
2. Boring Blogging
As thousands have bloggers have successfully demonstrated, a good blogger can make even the most mundane of topics sound interesting. The flip side is that a bad one can turn even the most fascinating subject into brain mulch.
Blogs that offer nothing to interest the eye or the mind or are intrinsically boring to read will scare readers away faster than you can say “Blog roll”. Blog readers do not have the time to read boring blogs since there are millions of alternatives.
If you want readers on your blog, you need to give them a reason to stay. Energetic, fresh and captivating writing paired with relevant and contextual images are the answer.
3. The Subject is Overdone
Blogging about something popular seems to make commercial sense. You write about something many people are interested in and many people will want to read it, right? Not quite.
If you are a brilliant blogger with a wealth of original ideas, you can be successful in an overdone niche. Fashion, cookery, craft, cars and all the usual hobbies and interests are blogged about ad infinitum so if you are not up to scratch with either your writing or your ideas, you will struggle to attract and keep loyal readers.
4. Lack of Fresh Content
Blogs thrive on regularly updated and fresh content.It is new content that helps your blog to rank in the search engines and attract new readers. Regular readers will grow tired of visiting your blog to find it hasn’t been updated for months and out-of-date blogs are a real turn off to potential new readers. Consistent updates are the key to both ranking well and keeping your readers happy.
5. Bad Writing
This is not the same as being boring. Bad writing can be anything from poor grammar and spelling to terrible sentence structure. Readers like to feel an affinity and a certain level of trust with bloggers they want to keep following.
Poor writing is not only a chore to read, it also makes the blogger seem a little untrustworthy and uninformed. Spell and sense checking your work before submitting will eradicate most of these errors but as proof reading our own work is pretty hard soon after writing, make sure you read your own past posts regularly and edit them when you spot flaws.
