01.21.08

Five Ways to Keep Your Visitors Reading More and Longer

Posted in Blogging at 11:00 am by Anita Bruton

Table of contents for Blogging Basics

What is the purpose of your blog? Of course, the answer is to drive visitors to buy your products or use your services. The longer your visitors hang around your blog reading the information you share, the more they get to know you. The more they get to know you, the more they like you and the more they will trust you. How can you keep your visitors interested?

Here are five tips to keep those vital visitors happy:

Give your blog visitors unique content. Be original. People stick around longer if they find something that they haven’t seen anywhere else. This doesn’t mean your content has to be totally unique. It can be similar to other content but put a twist on it. Take this blogging series for example. There are plenty of other blogs that write about blogs. But I put it into a series.
Give your visitors a way to print the material you write about. Of course there is the standard copy and paste into a word doc, or right click and print; but look what I’ve done with the Writers Corner. I give you a way to save each post as a PDF. Save it to your computer for future reference or print it out.
Provide an online directory of resources and links for your visitors. My resource and links page is a growing list of people and sites that I have done business with or who provide information I find useful and hope my readers will as well.
Make your text easy on the eyes. You don’t want it too big or too small. You don’t want it too light or too dark. Text that is too big can come across as yelling, much the same as using all caps. Too small, and your text becomes difficult to read. Use a 12 pt font for consistent results. Try to use a black or dark blue font on a white background for easy reading. Too light, and visitors will be straining their eyes to see it.
Be professional and double check your content for spelling and grammar errors. Mistakes in spelling and grammar are huge turn offs to your visitors. Please, please, edit and proofread carefully! Even after you publish your post, go back in a day or two and read it again. Often a mistake that was hiding from you will blatantly pop out a couple of days later when your eyes are seeing it fresh!

There you have it. Five ways to keep your visitors reading more and reading longer.

Good writing,

Anita Bruton
Professional Freelance Writer