Is your blog relevant to your audience?
Is your blog relevant to your audience?
I’ve just tried to find an interesting blog on Public Relations (PR). So, I googled ‘PR blog’ and found a listing of the top 100 PR blogs.
Excellent, someone had done all the work and ranked the 100 most popular PR blogs with links to each.
But, there, the fun ended. I must have clicked on 10-12 blogs in the post and found none that I lingered on for very long. The longest I stayed on a blog page was 30 seconds – the shortest 9 seconds.
Here’s a few tips based on my frustrating research.
1. Make your blog really relevant really quickly.
Make it easy for a visitor to find blog posts quickly. Busy, cluttered landing pages are a turn off, particular given the increase in people using mobile phones to search for content. Anything that stops the reader getting to the point quickly loses you a reader and possibly money if you were hoping to sell a product or service from your site.
2. Catchy headlines
We all scan website pages and blog pages to find the blog post that will stand out for us in that nine seconds.
Call us in with your headline, which should be no more than five to 10 words.
3. List blog posts
Get a blog template that allow you to list blog posts on the right hand side. That way, we don’t have to scroll down, and down, and down to find the next blog post to see if that’s the one that will catch our attention.
4. Get to the point
A blog post doesn’t have to be an essay – it does need a beginning, middle and end, but it is not St Paul’s epistle and should not go on forever. One point, one paragraph. Short, informative posts or, better still, a ‘how-to’ post will keep the reader with you. And, if you’re lucky, they will bookmark your page to keep an eye on future posts.