A few summers ago I needed a B&B in a small village. The Internet booking promised me an airy and cosy room with nice extras. Once arrived though, my place for the night, a hot attic room, hadn’t been cleaned for years, the bedside table lamp didn’t work and the information leaflet was outdated. If this had been a website I would never have visited it again.
I noticed many similarities between hosting guests and writing blog posts. Think of your favourite site for a moment. Why do you like using it? Why do you keep going back? If two sites offered the same, which one would you prefer? Words such as user-friendly, well-organized, to-the-point, better service might come to mind. In this post I will focus on bloggers. How can you address an audience? How can you write engaging content and earn regular visitors? Some tips and tricks I’ve stumbled upon so far.
Be a good host
You want to attract your visitors and engage them to take action. You want them to come back.
- Blog visitors tend to be scanners. Writing for the web is not the same as writing an essay. Blog followers are Internet readers: they read a web page like the first page of a newspaper, take a look at the headlines, get a general idea of the topic and only read on when they’re still interested.
- What does your visitor expect? To keep your followers you must provide information efficiently: make it easy to find useful content quickly. “He came, he saw and he bounced off”, we could say.
Be a good housekeeper
You want your visitors to come back - and they should like to return.
- Make your language readable. Provide complex information in an easy-to-understand way. Treat your visitor as a friend: address him or her in a friendly, familiar way.
- Use the active tense. “Write your comments here” instead of “Comments should be written here”
- Keep it to the point. Use “pen” and not “writing utensil”
- Use a dictionary, check grammar. Find a beta-reader before publishing, read it backwards yourself.
- Use keywords. Avoid writing only for search engines. You want to address a community.
- Make your message clear. Write important words in bold or in italics, use different font sizes to emphasize, avoid underlining.
- Arrange your site. Make your posts easy to use, easy to scan.
- Clear titles. Put the most important content first: scanning readers will still get the main idea.
- Relevant information comes before details and background.
- Use bullet points.
- Discuss one topic per post.
- Make short paragraphs. One idea per paragraph.
- Help your audience to navigate. Make it easy to know where they are on your site and where to go from there.
- Make keywords noticeable.
- Make it visual. Content and design interact - make it easy to get to the message and to remember it.
- Use colours, icons, buttons, images, ...
- Keep hyperlinks simple. E.g. not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver but The Beaver.
- Add white space.
- Be reliable.
- Include context. How do you relate to your topic?
- Be accurate in reporting. Hyperlink your sources.
- Make updates and date them.
- Involve your customers. Ask for feedback, make comments a dialogue.
In the end…
… it’s all about mutual interests. If bloggers strive to make their writings worth reading and their sites efficient, visitors will become followers. In this post I listed some tips for a writer to achieve this goal.
I’d like to thank the writers of these posts for their useful information:
Enchanting Marketing, Web Content, Content Fac.
This writing’s part of our “Hello world!” introductory posts on the Pronovix blog from our new documentarians Kathleen, Laura and Steve. You can read Steve’s post here and Laura’s one here.
