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.

Get to Know Your Audience

Spend some time learning more about your audience. Read the comments, visit their blogs, and ask questions. By getting to know your readers, you will find it easier to talk to them as they would expect you to.

These days, you have no excuse to say that you don’t know who your readers are, what they think and what the want. With so many free tools waiting to be used, you only have to want to communicate better.

The Value of Website Statistics

Take a look at your statistics:

1. Check out the entrance and exit paths.
2. Analyze the search terms that got your visitors on your blog and see which ones offered a better conversion from visitor to reader.
3. Check your referrers and study their content and audience.
4. Find out which posts are your most popular and most commented.
5. If you’re using Google Analytics, make sure you check you Navigation Summary (on the right side of the page under the “Content” tab)

Statistics can provide a lot of useful information about your readers and their activity on your blog.

One Way Communication Tools

Consider running polls one your blog. Readers love to feel involved, it what makes a group become a community.
WP-Polls is a wonderful and easily customizable WordPress plugin, that you can either include in your sidebar as a widget, or in the content of you blog posts. It’s the one I’m currently using on Blogsessive’s sidebar.

Two Way Communication Tools

Are you using Skribit? Skribit is a great online application that can ease the blogger-reader communication. As they call it, it’s a “social-suggestion” tool that goes in your sidebar just like a widget, allowing your readers to suggest future topics for you to blog about. Of course, you can add your own suggestions and let the readers cast their vote on them.

Alternatively, you can create a series of “Questions and Answers” posts, insuring not only a good communication level between you and your readers, but also gaining a bit of traffic through having people submitting questions by commenting.

Keep You Readers Close and Your Visitors Even Closer

If you’re looking to grow your community, learn how to talk to everyone, including your newcomers. Don’t complicate things, let your ideas speak for themselves, and on this thought, I’ll close with another great quote from the Greek philosopher Epictetus:

“Be concise in your writing and talking, especially when giving instructions to others.”
Epictetus (50-120)

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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%.

Real life examples to consider

There is obviously a reason why our websites are called personal blogs. Not only because we keep track of things we’ve done, or personal experiences, but also because creating a community around our blogs is like growing a group of friends and acquaintances.

When writing our articles we should always consider our audience, our topics, and most times get personal with our community by letting aside any corporate twaddle that could throw a cold shadow over our postings.

So, how do we do it? Imagine these three real life situations and think about how they apply in your case:

1. You’re in your living room with a group of friends, having a relaxing chatter;
2. You’re in a pub or at a party with a mixed group of friends and people you barely know;
3. You’re in a meeting with people you’ve just met.

What tone do you choose when addressing the audience in each of the above situations?

From where I stand, I believe that the tone you’d go for in the first situation would be perfect for a family blog, or a blog you share mostly with your friends. The third situation can easily be applied to corporate blogs, where a more conservative style is necessary.

The tone for the second situation is the most difficult to find, due to the amount of unknown variables such as interests, characters or adversities. Even so, when blogging you have the advantage of your focused information, which, in most cases, tells enough about your readers’ preferences, and this is where balance comes into play.

From personal experience

Take Blogsessive for example. My posts have a personal touch. I like to talk about how I feel about what other people said, share my opinion on some blogging tips or posts, or publish blog writing tips from my own experience.

Words like “me”, “I” and “you” can be found in each of my posts because they ensure a conversational style. I use a moderate tone in my articles, but as soon as someone decides that a post deserves a comment (which is quite a big step to take), I get more personal and try to use a style that would find an echo with my commenter. Many times, before even posting my comment, I visit my reader’s blog and learn about him: who is he, what does he like, what does he talk about and how does he do it; and I would suggest that you do the same, obviously, based on the amount of time that you have at your disposal.

Hi, my name is Alex and I’m a blogger!

So, basically, finding the right tone is not that hard. It only takes a bit of time to experiment with different styles and approaches, real life situations and deciding based on the reactions.

How about you? What are you blogging about and how did you come up with your perfect tone?

Photo credits to Janet Burgess

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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:

• Write a short introductory paragraph and tell me exactly what I’m about to read.
• Make use of paragraphs and line breaks. Huge blocks of text are very hard to scan.
• Make use of lists. I’m a list fanatic. Lists are easy to scan and stand out of all those text blocks. Try to put valuable information in them.
• Whenever you talk about numbers and statistics, use graphics. It’s much easier for me to read and interpret a graph, instead of reading 2 paragraphs about percentages.
• Give me more things to read. In your posts, sometimes you mention things that are related to the topic, but you don’t want to develop more. Link them to a place where I can read more about them, preferably on your blog, but it’s OK if it’s elsewhere too (Wikipedia.com for example).
• Whenever you link to another blog post or website, use strong, descriptive text anchors.
• Ask me questions, smart questions. I love to put my mind at work, and if the question is interesting enough, I’ll answer in your comments, or even blog about it, giving you a free backlink.
• Create blog post sections and use subheadings so that I can jump between paragraphs of interest.
• Use basic text styles to make some ideas or elements more noticeable. Use bold and italics.

Conclusion

To achieve success in life or business, you need to be organized. A post is successful when it gathers more readers and backlinks. Organize it. Keep the important information clean and noticeable, and you will see not only more readers, but also more time spent on your blog and a lower bounce rate.

If you’re looking for more information on how to organize your blog post you should also read this article: The Proper Structure of a Blog Post.

Photo Credits to Jay Simons.

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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.

As a blogger, having a reader-oriented strategy can generate a bigger exposure and of course, blog loyalty. While applying SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques you can gain a lot of new readers for your blog, using CRM-like methods will help you in learning more about your current readers, and how to turn them into loyal ones, even promoters of your blog.

These readers are the ones that link back from they own blogs, comment heavily on yours, submit your articles to social bookmarking websites, and let’s face it, sometimes, relationship marketing and promotion by word-of-mouth does a way better job than paying hundreds of dollars for services like Google AdWords.

Reader-oriented Strategies

While businesses have to pay huge amounts of money for CRM specific software, us, bloggers have all we need at our fingertips: Our blog. And if we blog for money, our blog is our business.

Take your time to go through your comments, visit your readers’ blogs, analyze your statistics for keywords, popular articles, ask questions and find the best strategy to engage your readers in being an active part of your blog’s community.

Some of these strategies include competitions with prizes for the most active people, implementing readers’ suggestions or writing about what your readers specifically ask you to. Some bloggers use Twitter’s services to establish a quicker way to communicate with their readers, without having to post short articles that otherwise wouldn’t add much value to their blog. The great part is that the readers’ response to those short Twitter posts can generate great content and blog affinity.

A great example of reader-centric strategy has been recently implemented by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger with his “Speed Posting” series: 1 reader question, 3 minutes to answer. This strategy has generated a huge response in his community, a lot of new content and hundreds of comments spread over a few 3 minute-posts.

Final Thoughts

Your blog can only gain from a strong, smart, reader-oriented strategy and always remember that a good blogger should be a good manager of his business – his blog.

Over to you, what reader strategies have you successfully implemented on your blog, so far?

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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.

With the abundance of information hitting our brains each minute, we have to filter everything right from the first contact. The first impression is vital. Take your time to rethink and possibly rewrite your headlines, maybe even reconsider your blog’s design & structure, the placement of different sections that could generate further traffic and more reading time.

Peoples tend to evaluate things based on the general impression left by the group that these things are part of. In our case, being part of a blogging network can, and in most cases will, result in a transfer of perception quality. Pick your alliances carefully and always aim for the winning situation, since this phenomenon can produce negative effects.

While we’re not proud of it, we tend to judge people based on stereotypes. We judge them by their culture, occupation, age, sex, religion, race and more. We’ve been fighting this mentality for a while now, and probably it’s going to take more. Whenever you give away personal information, keep in mind that some of these subjects can affect the way our blog will be perceived by the general audience.

Readers have sources they respect. Look for your target audience’s favorites and consider driving a marketing campaign through their blogs. Remember all those commercials where TV, movie or sports stars recommend different products? It’s basically the same thing, a transfer of perception and respect from your readers’ sources to your blog.

Do your best to keep on publishing good, original content, but always remember that your personality, tastes, habits, group affiliation play an important part when it comes to building a name for yourself and your blog.

Photo credits to Sigurd Decroos

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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.

I read but I don’t hear you.

I’m not asking you to start posting multimedia on your blog, audio or video, even though it’s quite a trend (for some a necessity) these days. It’s just that I keep reading your post but I can’t find a way to relate.
Engage me in a discussion, keep my interest up, talk to me, ask me. Let’s communicate. If I don’t feel that I’m asked to interact, I won’t.

I’m on your blog and so is everyone else.

And further more, it seams that a few more other bloggers are on your blog too! Are you still using the default theme? Or maybe the most downloaded or popular theme on WordPress.org? Change it! Personally, I hate talking over the phone. I prefer a face-to-face conversation any time, and for me, your reader, your blog’s aspect is your face. Show yourself!

I’m on your blog, but you’re not.

I’ve decided to give your article a chance and even post a comment. Then another one, and one more, but you’re nowhere to be found. Your blog is useless without me, and other people like me that read and share their thoughts. Respect our interest and be present in our conversations. Interact with me!

I can’t find an article of interest.

I’m not saying that they are not, but my time is limited. I have work to do, my own blog to update and a personal life too. I’ll only be looking at your titles and decide whether I’ll be reading any further or not. If your title is something like “I Was Wondering…”, I’ll most probably leave you to wonder alone. But if you’re specific about a problem and I’m interested in that too, chances are that I’ll click and read your post, and who knows, maybe even add a comment.

You’ve got me with one post, but where are the others?

Please, don’t waste my time making me click through countless links to get to another post. I want to see what’s new, what others have enjoyed reading on your blog, I need a visible search option and clickable tags. Yes, I like tags. They help me find related content fast and easy.

Your blog claims to be focused, yet I see your pictures everywhere.

I’m really glad you’ve enjoyed your vacation, that you have such a nice dog and that you listen to such good music, but that’s not why I’ve come to your blog. You said that you’re writing about “design trends”, so please, don’t mix these topics with personal ones. From time to time is acceptable, but be moderate.

I can’t follow you.

Where are your feeds? Where can I subscribe? I can’t take a full day typing website addresses in the URL bar. I have one to cover them all. Trust me, if your title and even a small excerpt of your post catch my attention, I’ll come by and read your post, on your blog, giving you a unique visitor and probably a few more pageviews, if you know how to lead me through your blog.

Some say that you should be blogging for your readers if you want to be a successful blogger. Other say that you should write for yourself, to be yourself when writing, and readers will come and appreciate that. Personally, I think it’s a mixture of them both. Be yourself but organize for your readers. Step out of your blog’s box and try to look through my eyes. Do you like what you see?

Photo credits to Lars Sundström

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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.

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive