Effective Communication: Know Your Audience
Sometimes, having a great idea to write about can give your blog posts a boots, but most time it’s not enough. In order to establish a good, effective level of communication with your readers you should consider a few essential factors that could improve your writings and clear their path to your readers’ minds.
When blogging on a certain topic, you’ll be automatically considered either a specialist, or an enthusiast. While enthusiasts have more premises to write using a natural tone, specialists tend to overuse industry specific language which could make it hard to spread ideas through a general audience.
In terms of communication, William Butler Yeats – Irish poet and dramatist – said it best:
“Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.”
William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)
We’re talking about your blog, which means it’s about your thoughts, your advice, your skills, but if you don’t manage to get your ideas past the screen, they can be totally brilliant and still won’t get you anywhere.
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Finding Your Reader-friendly Blogging Tone
With the amazing amount of blogs available out there, a question raises naturally. Why do we read some blogs, and not others? Why do we follow certain bloggers and become more active in their comments section? Content, information is definitely one of the key factors, but what is information if it’s not nicely wrapped in a good delivery package?
Think of your articles as if they were products on a shelf. Are you going to pick the cheapest looking? Surely not! That’s also available for bloggers. The way you deliver your message is extremely important and finding the right tone should be a top priority on your list.
Different people have different personalities. Your own style can help you connect with some people, while pushing others away. So, basically the keyword should be: Balance.
Shifting from classic media to blogs
Over the years we’ve seen a migration of readers from classic media like newspapers to blogs. No matter how talented some journalists are, they still have writing guidelines to follow when writing an article in the paper, which means that their own tone will be moderated by the overall publication’s tone. Knowing this, many of them decided to publish additional blogs, where they could express in a more natural way.
This is the advantage that bloggers have over the classic media. We can be ourselves, 100%.
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How to Make Your Blog Posts More Readable
Have you ever come across a post title that startled your interest, but as soon as you got to the content you couldn’t read it? I did! And why didn’t I read the post if the title was so interesting? Because the content was too cluttered. Because no matter how valuable was the information, I simple could not pull my self to go through a labyrinth of words to find the good ideas.
When you’re offering quality information, are you willing to lose your readers because you did not organize your blog post the right way? It’s extremely important to have a better structure in each blog post, before you hit that “Publish” button, and by doing so, you will dramatically increase your blog’s readability.
What I need to find in a blog post
As I said, I often come across long, cluttered posts that annihilate the initial interest. I bet that most of them offered great insight on different matters, but, to make me read them it would have taken some of these elements to guide me:
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My Blog, My Business
Many bloggers fail when it comes to building a better blog. Making your blog stand out of the crowd requires a strategy, just like a business. Even if you’re not part of an affiliate program of selling your own products through your blog, think of it this way: You’re selling yourself, your knowledge, your writings.
And if you’re selling those, in the end, what are your readers if not your clients? That’s why a reader-centric strategy is a must for everyone looking to grow his blog into a successful one.
Customer/Reader Relationship Management
In business terms, we’re talking about the Customer Relationship Management (CRM), a process that requires a good, two-way, level of communication between the business and its customers, in our case, the blogger and his readers. The role of CRM is to provide the business with more accurate information about the needs and wants of customers.
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How to Improve Your Readers’ Perception
A blog’s success is measured by the number and loyalty of its readers. Not by how many visits it receives daily, not even the number of backlinks. In the end, the more time your visitors spend on your website, the more pages they visit and the more they come back or further recommend your blog are the real measuring tools of your blog’s perception. In this post I’m going to cover 5 important factors that can improve this perception.
While writing about topics of interest or optimizing your blog for better search results could be enough to generate visits, the readers’ interest has to be maintained through a perception improvement.
Readers tend to react better to bloggers to whom they can relate, to bloggers that have similar views, ideas, even lifestyle. That’s why it’s very important to find your voice and give everything you write a personal note.
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That’s Why I Don’t Read Your Blog!
When launching Blogsessive, I’ve tried to put myself in your place to find the reasons for not reading a blog. Some of the answers came out fast, but for some, I had to look around the web to form a better opinion.
So, if you want me as your reader and I’m not one, it’s probably because…
I don’t like the way you write.
And no, I’m not talking about your “style”. You could be a beginner and style is developed in time. What I don’t like is all the emoticons and differences in font and color styling that you use. I really care about my eyes and forcing me to go through a jungle of styles to read your article is pretty annoying. Keep it simple: titles, subtitles, bold, italics, blockquotes and lists.
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10 Blogging tips for a better reader experience
The quality of the reader’s experience is essential to your blog’s success. It is most important that you deliver original, interesting and well-written content every time you hit the “Publish Post” button. The way you manage to deliver this content will finally result in your reader’s reaction toward your blog. So, whenever you want to publish a new article, you should consider the following blogging tips:
1. Choose a topic
And stick with it. We live in a dynamic era. People have less and less time to spend for themselves or to look for information. Deliver you content in a straight-forward way, without altering the subject.
2. The Title is your best ally
Whenever you decide to post a new article, try to extract the essence of the topic and formulate one short, descriptive title that perfectly represents the information that unfolds below. The shorter and more expressive the title, the easier for people to find it, remember it and recommend it.
3. Unique content
Provide your users with unique content. It’s very hard these days, but it’s well worth it. If your topic has been approached before by other bloggers, it doesn’t mean that you can’t express your opinions on the subject. Just keep in mind the fact that readers tend to read multiple sources for a topic and select the most representative and clean information they find. Who knows, maybe you’ll find those who share your point of view on the matter.
4. Write for people
Some bloggers tend to write their articles in a fanatic-SEO way. It’s always good to use representative keywords in your post, but don’t exaggerate. Your most important friend is the reader. The better the reader’s experience, the better your blog will rank in search listings. Those indexing bots that everyone talks about have been developed, after all, by humans. You might fool them once, but does it worth the risk?
5. Use images
Only when they provide help for a better understanding of a term/fact/topic. A picture is worth a thousand words, but keep in mind that blogging is about writing, not drawing.
6. Reference
Give your article more credibility. Provide users with good reference to your content so that if a reader wants to find out more information on the topic, he/she will have the right tools at his/her disposal, making your website the perfect start for a future knowledge development.
7. Link building
If other bloggers have approached the same topic with interesting content, relate you content to theirs. This will attract fellow bloggers to you website and so help you develop a good linking system. The key to the success of this step resides in the quality of your content.
8. Use tags
Think of tags as if they were keywords. They are helpful for indexing bots, but most important, they help readers find related, relevant content. Pick your tags carefully, in perfect sync with the provided information.
9. Cross article reference
If, in the past, you have published similar or related articles, make sure to include them in your new post as related posts. This will help users find more content on your blog, spend more time and create more page views. If you use an ad system, I’m sure that the importance of those page views is familiar to you.
10. Respond to comments
Take a moment and engage your readers in a discussion. It’s always nice to show your appreciation to those that give a few minutes of their busy life to comment your posts.
Finally, consider these blogging tips, not as secure paths to success, but as ways to ensure the quality of your readers’ experience.
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