On a typical day, we read multiple blogs but at the same time, we do give a miss to few of them. And do you ever wonder, why you do not get enough visitors on your blog? Or do you find higher bounce rate on the blog? If you’re intrigued by all of these, read further as I explore critical blogging mistakes that can be avoided to ensure better traffic and make people stay on your blog longer.
1. Design
Having an optimal design is one of the key ingredients to the success of your blog. The number one advice is – do not load your blog with multiple plugins. Only have key information, social sharing on the sidebars. One of the advice I give frequently is to use the least amount of animation on the sidebars. They distract the user from reading and can turn them away. Same is the case with ads. Do not stuff your page with ads. And also, maintain the font style across your posts. Keep the blog clutter free and make it easier for visitors to navigate.
Other point is, understand your audience. It you think that many of them would be reading on a mobile device, try going for Responsive designs to ensure best experience across devices.
2. Loading Time
It was only today that I was introduced to Google PageSpeed. It’s a great place to analyze your site and by paying few dollar you can even get the site optimized. But to keep it simple, ensure you have optimized the images for web viewing. This reduces the size of images and thereby increasing the speed too. Also, limit the number of plugins on your site. The page loading time is also dependent on the way Javascripts are used, again those can be optimized.
On WordPress, you might also want to use the W3 Total Cache plugin to cache some of the elements. It also support the use of CDN, if you are planning to use it.
3. Social Sharing
With the advent of social sharing sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, et al the world has shrunk. Sharing information has never been so easy. Hence, absence or improper use of social sharing buttons is one of the biggest mistake. A blog can never be popular if it’s not read by multiple people across the geography. So, make it easy for your visitors to share the blog and also list all your social touch points for them to follow you. You can use the Digg Digg plugin to have social sharing buttons on your blog.
4. Call to Actions
Without proper call to actions, remember, your content is ‘dead’. Here’s my previous post on ‘How to Write Killer Call to Actions‘. Each of your post should get the reader to perform an action. Those can be as simple as – ‘Please share it forward’ or ‘Please comment below’. Also, make it easier for them to find the ‘Call-to-action’ (can be in a different color) and perform the actions.
5. Content
It’s not without a reason that we say ‘Content is the king’. Remember, the amount of time spent of research for a topic should be at the least double than the time that is spent of writing. If you’ve enough amount of data points, it’s without a doubt that your content will be valuable. Write, crisp and succinct posts, so that the reader can find it easy to read. Keep self-promotion to bare minimum and dish out content that would be valuable for your readers.
While blogging can be a fun in itself, I hope the above points will be useful to you and help you make a better blog. If there are any other mistakes that can be avoided, please make sure to share them in the comments below.
Photo Credit: Joaquin Villaverde Photography via photopin cc
