How to Avoid Your Blog Becoming a Ghost Town: 10 Tricks (& Treats) for Keeping Readers Engaged

A blog is one of your most valuable assets online when it comes to executing a digital marketing strategy. It has the ability to attract visitors through search engines, showcase your expertise, strengthen your brand and give your customers, both new and existing, a reason to be loyal to you and your brand. 

However, there’s one problem that businesses with a blog will encounter when they try to run it themselves, and it’s that starting a blog is far easier than maintaining one and, subsequently, keeping readers interested in it for the long term. You might think that publishing content and then sharing it on social media is enough to keep things fresh and ensure engagement is high, but there’s a lot more to it than that. 

Even though we’re approaching Halloween, you can use this article as a way to keep readers engaged, therefore mitigating the chances of your blog becoming a ghost town for visitors and search engine results pages (SERPs), all year round. So, here’s how to ensure your blog isn’t ghosted by the people you need most – a relevant audience. 

 

1. Know who you’re writing for

One of the quickest ways to lose readers is to write for everyone and anyone, regardless of the industry you work in or the services or products you offer. If your content is trying to appeal to everyone, then it will easily become irrelevant on a more general level. Instead, you need to know who it is you’re actually writing for. 

This includes gathering information about the audience, such as their age, their interests, their problems, the questions they ask, the level of knowledge they already have and the type of content they prefer. You can gather information like that using a wide range of different tools and tactics, such as:

• Google Analytics
• Talking to your existing customers directly
• Looking at heatmaps
• Creating simple reader and customer profiles
• Google Search Console
• Meta Business Suite/Ads Manager
• LinkedIn Page Analysis
• YouTube Analytics
• TikTok Analytics
• Semrush
• Similarweb
• SparkToro
• Hotjar
• Data displayed on your blog

 

2. Give readers a reason to be loyal

People don’t return to a blog simply because it’s there. They return because they expect to find something useful, interesting or entertaining. Think about what it is that makes your blog different. Perhaps you provide practical advice, original research, expert commentary, entertaining stories or easy-to-follow guides for good measure. 

Regardless of your value proposition, you should make it consistent. You want your readers to develop an expectation that visiting your blog is something that’s worth their while. This is particularly important for businesses. 

Rather than constantly producing articles that promote the services or products you sell, you should generate content that helps audiences to solve their problems and make better, more informed decisions in the process. The key? Build trust initially and then go through the commercial benefits.

 

3. Create content around real questions

One of the easiest ways to develop engaging blog topics is to listen to your audience. In this case, your audience is also your customers. They’re telling you what they want to know through the questions they ask. 

So, if you listen carefully, you’ll find that your audience is giving you the material you need to make your blog as engaging and as valuable and informative as you need it to be. Turn those questions and queries into useful articles and resources. 

But the real question? How do you identify those questions and queries? There are multiple ways of identifying customer pain points and general musings. To find out what you need to know, pay particular attention to:

• Customer enquiries
• Sales conversions
• Support requests
• Search queries
• Social media comments
• Online reviews
• Frequently asked questions
• Discussions within your own industry or sector 

 

4. Never underestimate the power of a great headline

You could write the best article in the world, but if nobody clicks on it, or even finds it, then it’s completely useless to you as a business. Your headline is often the first, and sometimes the only, part of your content that a potential reader will see. 

A strong headline should communicate the value of reading the article without resorting to misleading clickbait. For example, rather than entitling your article ‘Website Design Tips’, you should entitle it ‘10 Simple Website Design Ideas to Improve Your Conversion Rate’. 

The latter tells the reader what they can expect and why it’s worth their time. There are a number of different approaches you can take here to make things look more interesting and to arouse curiosity while setting accurate expectations, including:

• ‘How-to’ headlines
• Numbered lists
• Questions
• Problem-solving headlines
• Mistake-based headlines
• Curiosity-driven headlines
• Benefit-focused headlines

 

5. Make sure your content is easy to read

Even the most excellent and accurate information can be difficult to decipher and consume for the average person if it’s displayed as block text or is littered with jargon. Online readers like to scan the content to see if it’s worth their time before reading it through properly. 

The key to this often comes down to avoiding the use of jargon and industry-specific language where more reading needs to be done elsewhere. Put everything into layman’s terms and don’t use language that the average person won’t be able to understand. 

For instance, if you offer chiropractic services, then avoid the use of ‘scapula’ if you’re referring to the shoulder blade, for instance. There are other ways of making sure that your content is easy to read, such as formatting. Make content easier to consume by using:

• Short paragraphs
• Descriptive subheadings
• Bullet points
• Numbered lists
• Bold emphasis, where applicable
• Images 
• Quotes 
• Highlighted insights
• Plenty of white space

6. Add some personality

Your blog doesn’t have to sound like a monotonous instruction manual. Even business content can have personality when it’s done right. You still need to keep things professional, however, so the balance can be difficult to maintain. This is often why businesses outsource this type of work to experts like the ones we have here at Kumo. When it comes to adding personality to your company blog content, you should, where appropriate:

• Use a conversational tone
• Share opinions
• Add relevant humour
• Acknowledge mistakes 
• Discuss lesson learnt 

Your readers want to connect with other people and not a faceless business or corporation. Your brand’s personality can also help to differentiate your blog from that of your competitors, especially if they’re producing content along similar lines. The trick is to remain authentic. Forced humour or excessive informality can be just as off-putting, however, as overly corporate writing. This is why the balance needs to be right. 

 

7. Mix up content formats

If every article that you’ve ever published follows the same format, then it can become predictable for your readers. Don’t get me wrong, this can work well for some industries, as it can be argued that readers know what they’re getting. 

However, by changing up content types and formats, you’ll keep people talking. It can also make for content that can be easily shared on social media, for instance. Some of the content formats and types you can try out on your blog to change things up a bit include:

• How-to guides
• Listicles
• Case studies
• Expert interviews
• Opinion pieces
• FAQs
• Round-ups
• Original research 

 

8. Keep the publishing schedule realistic

When running a blog, consistency matters. However, it doesn’t mean you need to publish five times a week. In fact, setting an unrealistic publishing schedule is one of the easiest ways to burn out. 

It’s better to publish one genuinely useful article every week or two as opposed to publishing several rushed pieces every single day and then disappear for months on end. Choose a schedule you can realistically maintain. 

A simple editorial calendar can help you to plan topics in advance, balance different content formats and avoid scrambling for ideas at the last minute. Consistency creates expectations, and expectations are what will keep bringing new and existing readers to your site. 

 

9. Refresh older content

Keeping a blog alive doesn’t mean constantly creating brand-new articles. Your existing content may contain some of your biggest opportunities, so reviewing older content will give you an opportunity to ask yourself if:

• Facts are still accurate
• Statistics are up to date
• Quotes are still relevant
• Any links are broken
• Information is still correct
• The content could be expanded
• The headline may be improved
• There are newer examples to add
• The introduction could be stronger
• There are related articles that can be linked to

By refreshing older, valuable content, you can improve its usefulness, therefore giving it a new lease of life. It can also be more efficient than creating an entirely new article from scratch. This is a great tactic if you have limited hours or budget, but still want your blog to make a good impression. 

 

10. Keep your content discoverable

Simply publishing the content you have isn’t enough these days. People need to be able to find it. Search engine optimisation can help your articles appear when people search for relevant topics. With this in mind, you should consider the search terms your audience is likely to use, but avoid writing exclusively for search engines. 

The priority here should be creating useful content that real people will want to find and consume. Also, promotion of your articles via other platforms is a useful method used in content marketing. Some examples of where you can utilise other platforms to ensure people discover your content include:

• Sharing on social media
• Including them in newsletters
• Linking to them from other places on your website
• Linking blog posts from one to another

 

 

Kumo is pleased to provide a wide range of digital marketing services, including content creation, SEO, PPC, website design and more. You can rest assured that our team of dedicated experts can set you apart from your competitors with excellent content creation and copywriting services. If you’d like further information about how we can help you today, get in touch with a member of our friendly, specialist team – we’re always happy to hear from you.