How many steps do you need for success with your blog? Take a quick look around the web and you’ll be told its anything from 3 to 21 steps. You’ll find advice that tells you if you have a blog post called “Seven Steps to…” you’ll attract readers, all based on a myth that people are attracted to read something that is “seven steps”. You can even find arguments in forums debating the right number of steps to blog about…! Should it be five steps or seven?
Who cares? Well, bloggers who want to be successful, for a start. Anyone with a blog or who uses article marketing to boost their website is looking for every possible trick or technique to get more readers. So they look for advice that helps them gain an edge. “Aha,” they go, “I knew it, my article should have had seven steps, not five. Tomorrow I’ll add another two…!”
Here’s the truth of the matter – it doesn’t matter. Whether you have one step, or a million of them, no-one cares. What matters is that whatever you write is interesting. The single step you need to take in order to get more readers for your blog, your articles or your website, is to write stuff that’s more interesting. Simples..as the meerkats would say.
Millions of bloggers and probably as many business websites bemoan the fact that they don’t get enough readers. But if you look at their sites you’d probably easily spot why – what they write is boring. No-one really wants to read it. If you are not getting as many readers as you want for your blog, take a good, long, dispassionate view of your material. The reason you are not getting readers could well be down to the fact that no-one really finds what you write terribly interesting.
It means that you may well need to take a different approach; write about something else, take on a different writing style – who knows? But whatever you do, writing material that is more interesting is guaranteed to get you more readers.
That’s because the existing people who find it interesting will then tell their mates down the pub, they’ll Tweet about it, bookmark it, add it to places like Digg or StumbleUpon. Word of mouth will kick in. New research published today on brand advocacy shows that “word of mouth” is the most important method of getting people to engage with your company. People will not talk about your articles or recommend your blog to other people if your text is boring.
So, the single step you need to take to get more readers is really very straightforward – write stuff that’s more interesting. Don’t let yourself be enveloped by the great mass of dreary stuff that is filling the World Wide Web. Most material online is boring trivia; make your blog and articles stand out by being really interesting instead.
