Whether it be for profit, fun, or to inform a blog reader about a topic, a blogger needs to understand the basics of building a blogging community. Blogging is not just a series of articles strung together on a website; a whole lot of thought and deliberation goes into each post.
Throughout this article we’ll review the basics of building up a blogging community.
Table of Contents
Make the good stuff easy to find
Put yourself in the shoes of your reader. You’re in a rush, and you see a blog with lots of text in it but are having a hard time finding the article you want. After digging through countless articles, you leave after only minutes because you end up getting super frustrated. This is the basic thought process of a site visitor.
Using big and bold headers or arrow markers for popular articles or keywords will help counteract this and attract your reader to the article they came there to read. However, overdoing this will only defeat the purpose of attracting visitors to the proper content.
Do not bombard your guests with ads the minute they come into the site
This is a big no-no. Ad revenue might be the biggest source of money, but if your site has distracting ads saying “BUY THIS”, “TRY THIS”, inappropriate pictures or chaotically placed pop-up windows, then visitors might just think twice about surfing your site and sticking around as a reader. A good approach to this would be a gradual increase in ads, preferably within the article itself as opposed to the blogs landing page.
Guide your visitors to what YOU want them to see
When given too many options, visitors stress and, as a result, decide to leave. If you think about it, having a whole sidebar full of text, article names, statistics, and so on would intimidate a person very quickly. Keeping it simple works extremely well. Present the information in small chunks to guide visitors to view layer upon layer of the site’s content.
You only have your visitors attention span for three seconds, MAKE THE MOST OUT OF IT
A confused reader is not a happy reader. If the reader does not get something they want when they want it, they will leave. Display your most interesting posts in the parts that they will see first or in your sidebar. This will hopefully coax the readers’ curiosity, which will, in turn, lead them to read more. Arrange your blog so that the information is neither crowded nor compact.
A confused reader is not a happy reader.
In addition, it’s a good idea to choose an eye-pleasing color. Studies have shown that people are more likely to stay on and read when the design is eye-catching yet not distracting. The balance is subtle, but when executed well, it can lead to a successful blog. Now that you know some basics, go forth and start building up a blogging community.
