3 reasons your blog posts aren’t getting enough traffic.
From one starving writer to another.
Without getting into the long-winded version of all the various, and admittedly valid reasons, today I will be highlighting three of the less common factors that might be influencing your blog’s low number of traffic. This article assumes you have already been practicing the “art” of basic promotion (through social media and such) on your blogs and have still found it difficult to gain traction.
1. Your voice in your writing doesn’t flow or connect well with your audience.
Put simply, the way you write, in my opinion, should be similar to the way you would converse. Now, this might depend largely on the topic in which you’re writing about. A blog post whose audience is more of the formal, professional type, shouldn’t include words like “fuck” or “hell no” (well, maybe some do).
However, in today’s day of writing, anyone with an internet connection can type up anything and everything about topics. This means that you’re probably not the first one to write about how to perform data analysis on Geospatial data (article coming soon by yours truly). Therefore, your “voice” or how you write and communicate in your blog, is one of the only ways to truly differentiate yourself from others who write similar articles.
2. Your blog might be too wordy.
Here’s a controversial one. Being too wordy doesn’t essentially equate to the length of your post, but rather the depth in which you’re diving into certain details. For a better example, think of the common phrase, “Going off on a tangent.” We’ve all experienced either saying this, or have heard it from someone else in a conversation. Usually it’s in the form of, “I apologize for going off on a tangent.” That, for a lack of better words, equates to being too wordy. No bueno.
In writing you can just as easily fall into that rabbit hole. And perhaps you’re losing your readers because of that. If I came to hear about how you got from A to C, of course I’d like to know about the experiences of B as well, but if you end up talking about B for too long, I might get disinterested and inevitably stop and find a more concise article that will explain the process of A, B, and C in a more timely manner.
Be more aware of what you might be going into too much detail on when writing your blogs. It’s tough, I know. Sometimes, we feel as though there might not be enough information in our articles. But at the end of the day, think about who your readers are. They’re not dumb. So there isn’t a need to spoon feed every little detail of something that might not even be the main focus of your article in the first place.
3. You’re not making the topic your own.
A recurring idea in this article is that the writer’s market is incredibly saturated — and you know that. Therefore, as stated above, you’re probably not the first to write about any given topic. So how do you make it unique and your own? It’s not about writing more, or essentially the length in which you write your articles. It’s more about your own experiences and personal thoughts on the subject.
Call it anecdotal, if you will. Eventually (yes, eventually), you will be known as writer. But it won’t be because of what you’re writing about, but who you are as a writer. Again, going back to the fact that there are probably thousands of tutorials on ‘How to stay motivated’ your readers have options as to who to get their information from. Therefore, when you intertwine your articles with some of your personal experiences and quirks that your readers might find witty, relatable, or downright funny, they will follow you for you, and not just for your content.
Finally, think about the reader and the noise (other articles) they have to sift through in order to find and read your precious post. Sure, it’s harder now than ever to be a writer; and a noticeable one at that. But understanding how to differentiate yourself from the competition and gain real, organic readers and followers to your blog will eventually yield a more fruitful and fulfilling blog in the end.
