You’ve got a lot to write about, your brain is overflowing with fresh content. You set out about two and a half months ago to get with the times and start yourself a blog. After a few weeks of tinkering, you finally threw in the towel and hired someone to craft what you had in mind. Now your ideas are bursting at the seams!
So you finally have your chance. You have a nice looking blog, it’s hip to your audience and you are all set to start pumping out article after article. You know your audience and you know what they like. So let’s have at.
A few weeks go by and it’s just not hitting the mark, something must be wrong. Is this thing on?
That advertising you paid for definitely kicked in, the dollars are moving out and it shows right here that it is sending traffic to the site. You check the stats and the visitor numbers show promise. Wait, the last 30 visitors came in through your main page and only stayed 2 seconds or less?
Let’s have a look at that page. Hmm the site title tells me that this is Bob’s Blog The Marketing Guru, might be interesting. Let’s find out. Scanning, scanning, scanning. Wait a second, I don’t get it, the “logo” says marketing but not a single title here gives me any indication that I am about to dive into a genius marketing article. Ah well time to move on, after all I have things to do.
People are scanning, sifting, shifting and moving fast. They rarely have time to decipher cutesy and creative. They want a headline that is going to grab and convince them that reading through this article is totally worth the risk that they might get caught taking a little too long of a lunch hour this afternoon.
Be concise, be direct and get some attention.
Oh and search engines forget it. They came to your site expecting market trends, ROI, and social media. You have given them red ball, green banana and blue sock?
Ok this was a bit harsh but it makes you think about what you’ve been writing doesn’t it?
I would be lying if I were to say that I am not guilty of this myself. I to have often found myself clearing a space on the shelf for my award having just been recognized for this clever piece of genius I have written.
Oh yeah back to reality. People are not scanning to see how clever you can be with that play on words you passed off last week as a title, they want you to get to the point. They want to know why the hell they just landed on your blog after endless searching and they want to know now.
Exercise Forget, for a second, what it is that your blog focuses on, clear your head of the articles you have published in the past week and take a quick glance at your front page. From the viewpoint of an outsider, is there anything that grabs you? Can you figure out what is there for you to read?
It’s ok, happens to the best of us. Now focus on how you will make it better in the weeks to come.
