What is the point of a good article if it is not read? Here are five reasons why your content is overseen and how you can change that.
In theory it’s so simple: You have a good idea what you want to tell the world, you do all the research and at the end you write an article that is earth-shattering in your eyes or at least highly relevant and so you go on and publish it with the intention to inspire, inform or at least entertain thousands of readers. But then the bitter reality kicks in: instead of the anticipated crowd of interested readers, you reach only a handful of them. But don’t get frustrated. If you avoid some mistakes, the probability that your content will be read increases. Here are the most common ones:
Boring title
The best way to ensure that your content is not only not read, but not even clicked is to choose a boring title. The title is the business card of your article from which potential readers decide if they want to spend their next minutes reading this article.
If your title sounds boring or generic, why should the article behind it be better? A good title sets the tone for what the reader have to expect in your article. It should therefore be exciting and make them want to read more. You can achieve this in a variety of ways depending on the nature of your content. If it is appropriate, try it with humor. What also can often work is to ask a question relevant to your readers that will be answered in the course of the article or to highlight the most exciting aspect of your content. But be careful not to get too caught up in the clickbait trap. A flashy title that has nothing to do with the content of your article is very short-sighted and only produces disappointed readers. So try to be sincere and still spice up your title a bit.
Incorrect or lazy formatting
If you have managed to draw the attention of readers to your article with the appropriate title, many things can still go wrong. Another mistake that is often made is that content is not tailored to the needs of a digital audience. Today, content is not only consumed in the living room at home. Rather, usage habits have changed to the extent that many people read articles while on the move or while doing other things. It has also been proven that the way information is received has changed through the Internet and social media. Or as a study by Microsoft summarizes it: “Tech adoption and social media usage are training consumers to become better at processing and encoding information through short bursts of high attention.” This leads to the fact that only one in five people read web content word for; as the Australian marketing and SEO agency Dejan found out. Especially poor layout and text formatting is, according to the same study, a reason for 38% of readers not to read an article completely.
So what can you do? Divide your content into small, easily digestible blocks and subdivide it into subheadings. A list form can also help your readers make your articles easier to read.
It also does no harm to package important information into infographics, as they can be better understood in image form by readers, according to media psychology.
Cover topics that don’t interest anyone
Even when choosing a topic for your article, you can easily make mistakes by writing about things that don’t interest anyone or — to put it less fatalistically — that don’t interest your potential audience. That sounds hard at first, but it’s not the end of the world. Basically there are people for all topics who are also interested in it. The challenge is to find this group of people and to adapt your articles exactly to their needs. Your mantra should be: Be helpful.
Work your topic in a way that answers the questions of your potential audience, shows them something interesting or actively helps them. If you take this into account, you will never create content that really doesn’t interest anyone again.
Cover topics that are too broad
This error is in some way exactly the opposite of the above. In addition to irrelevant content, you can also produce content that interests a lot of people, but simply gets lost in the mass of similar articles. Let’s take “food” as an example. Everybody has to eat and many people are interested in it in addition to the basic human need — for example in the form of restaurants, recipes, healthy nutrition or the latest trends. A simple search query on Google results in 10,510,000,000 results for the term “food”. Of course, these are not all articles and journalistic contributions, but this shows you approximately the dimension in which we move here. How are people supposed to read your article when they have this broad selection? The answer is quite simple: Find your niche. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t deal with popular topics like “food”. Of course you can write about it. But within this topic, you should look for a niche that you can fill with your special expertise or exclusive news that sets you apart from the others.
Publish in the wrong places
Not only how or what you write influences your potential readership, but also how and where you publish your content. Here there are different approaches. You can publish your content for example via your own WordPress blog or via platforms like Medium. Both does not guarantee you new readers. Even if, for example, new articles worth reading appear daily on Medium’s homepage — this is only a fraction of all articles published daily on there. Another way is to place your content on news portals. Here you can use the reach of these established portals. But how do you best contact them?
Here crumbl can help you. Crumbl is an online platform that allows content creators to publish their articles easily and quickly on major news portals and thus increase their audience in no time.
Crumbl offers content creators the choice to submit their articles to different publishers and supports them in all steps of the content production process, from creation to tracking.
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Learn more about crumbl here or test us out in the closed beta phase and convince yourself.
All you have to do is send Felix a one-liner at felix@crumbl.org expressing your interest.
