Making Sure Your Blog Posts Are Read, Not Just Visited

There’s a very big difference between a blog post that gets visited by 10,000 people a day and another that gets read by 10,000 people each day. Relatively few businesses and webmasters take into account the fact that a blog hit made by a person that doesn’t read your posts in their entirety is about as much use as no hits at all. They come, they bounce and they make your analytics look like a bunch of garbage – you’d be just as well attracting far fewer readers that actually bother to read your posts.Blogging can be hugely powerful if you get it right, but often comes to nothing at all if you don’t know a few tricks of the trade. Is there a hard and fast method of ensuring all of your visitors read your whole posts from start to finish? Not exactly, but there are one or two tried and tested tips to follow to make it much more likely they’ll do so.    And here they are:Keep a Close Eye on AnalyticsPerhaps the most important rule to follow of all is also the simplest – use analytics to find out which of your posts and what kind of content holds the attention of your readers for longer, then produce more of it. If, for example, you can see that on June 23 you held onto 4% of readers for more than 30 seconds while on June 25 a full 75% of readers stuck around, you should be able to work out this isn’t a coincidence. The information is right there in front of you, so use it!Make it ConversationalUnlike a standard article, your blog posts should read in a manner that makes it sound like you’re talking to the reader at the time directly and solely. There’s a time, a place and a purpose for formal and academic writing styles – most blogs aren’t it. Conversational blogs encourage both thought and discussion – one of the most effective approaches of all is to periodically slip in questions and thought-provoking opinions.Learn the Art of ConcisenessPacking everything you want to say into a bite-size nugget your readers can digest isn’t just difficult; it’s more of an art-form in its own right. It takes plenty of practice and dedication but is nonetheless essential – nothing’s more of a turn-off than overly long and unbroken blocks of text in any blog.Be ConsistentYour readers will always respond better to your blog posts if they know exactly what they’re getting each time by way of length and read time. Jump from two-sentence posts to 5,000 word essays from one day to the next and things become messy and unfamiliar for the reader. It’s not necessary to be totally precise each time with the word count, but by establishing a sense of familiarity you help build a strong bond with any and all return readers.Play With FontsAnd finally, it sounds blatantly obvious because it really is – your choice of font and the font size you use could be affecting your reader numbers. Medium to large-sized fonts somehow make a blog post seem shorter and easier to read than a post written in a much smaller font. Feel free to swap and change a few times while keeping an eye on your analytics – you might be surprised how such small changes can add up to a big difference.