Blow them out of the water.

First let us define what is meant here by a great blog post. I am assuming that if you are reading this post you are looking for ways to increase the readership of your blog and that is what I am going to focus on – how to write a blog post which will bring lots of readers to your blog.

Hook them and keep them.

The definitions are out of the way and now we can focus on the meat of the issue. You want to write a fantastic post which will result in lots of visitors to your blog. There are three parts to achieving this goal:

• hook – the readers find your post
• sink – the readers find the post interesting
• liner – the readers spread the word about your post

All three parts are essential in order to create a great post. They work best if combined together. Thanks to the synergy their effectiveness reaches its maximum.

The hook

First you need to somehow put the post in front of as many eyeballs as possible. The way to catch the attention of your steady readers is to start with a good title and follow with a great opening. Attracting new readers who do not know yet about your blog is different; use the right keywords in the post so it gets picked up by the search engines, then apply a bit of SEO. You can also place the links to your post in relevant online forums. Be careful as this method works best if the post is truly connected to the issues discussed on the forum.

The sink

People are starting to read your post. Now you need to make sure they keep reading till the very end. You can guarantee this will happen by thinking of a topic and a goal for the post before you start writing it. Both the topic and the goal have to be crisp and clear. You cannot afford to confuse your readers. After you have the post content written it is absolutely crucial that you edit it – this step is essential if you want to end up with a great post. Some of the content will be thrown away during editing, this is normal and expected.

The liner

The readers like your post and feel good about having read it. You want them to tell other people about it, to spread the news. They will be more likely to do this if your post is in some way useful to them and if the content is still current. These types of posts will bring traffic to the whole blog over a long time not only for a short while. They’re known as Pilar Articles, Flagship Content or Cornerstone Content. Regardless of the name you chose for these posts they will be the workhorse of your blog. They will be linked to by other people and they will rank highly in the search engines. All these factors will contribute to bringing you more traffic.

The synergy

Use effectively all three parts of the process to end up with a wildly successful post. Perfection is rarely achieved the first time; you will get better if you do it again and again. You’re bound to hit it true. Happy and successful writing!

Related post(s)

• Today olivetalks celebrates three months (5)
• How to feed Google properly (2)
• One Size Does Not Suit All (4)
• The 5 stages of bloggers (3)
• Blogging strategies: length, frequency and topics (3)

The second month of olivetalks brought a continuation of the Rio Laser and Xen sagas, including some of their most successful posts so far which will be dealt with in more detail in the soon to be published post by ZoltarStark. Besides that we’ve published more miscellaneous posts about computers and a failed attempt at sarcasm. The average daily amount of viewers during the second month was seen to steadily climb to almost double the result from January. The olivetalks writers were very busy that month, trying to post something every day as documented in the upcoming post by LadyRostand.

The third month of our blog has showed an even faster growth, the total amount of views in March was over 50% higher than January and February combined! This surprised us a bit but nonetheless we are very happy with the olivetalks performance. We put at least part of the “blame” on the new fashion sense of the blog. The average daily amount of viewers in March was more than twice than in February. All that in spite of the writers changing the blogging strategy and publishing higher quality posts while reducing the posting frequency to half of the preceding months. LadyRostand is writing a post about the two main blogging strategies – often short posts or less often but longer ones. ZoltarStark will give some insights into publishing posts which attract many viewers based on our experiences with olivetalks.

Well done olivetalks

And thank you all our readers for your support, your comments or just showing up from different search engines. A blog without you, the readers, would not be half as fun!

Related post(s)

• How to write a great blog post? (0)
• One Size Does Not Suit All (4)
• The 5 stages of bloggers (3)
• Blogging strategies: length, frequency and topics (3)
• How to feed Google properly (2)

“I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it short.”

- Blaise Pascal

Jakob initially assumes that shorter articles have slightly higher information density than the long ones. The assumption makes sense – in most articles one can remove some fragments without affecting the value provided by the text. It might take extra time spent editing but the readers will appreciate it. With that model the preference is for the short articles so make sure to spend some time editing your articles with intention of reducing the length.

“Variety is the soul of pleasure.”

- Aphra Behn

Later though Jakob takes into account situations where the longer articles provide more value because the reader needs in-depth information. The readers still generally prefer short articles but not exclusively. Their “diet” now contains both short and long articles since the readers are trying to optimize their cost/benefit ratio. So with this mixed model you need to write both short summaries and longer comprehensive posts. This way you provide better match for the readers’ needs.

In the end there’s no simple answer. Too much depends on the target audience of your blog. If you’re looking for lots of visitors then shorter articles will be more useful for you since people find it easier to spend one minute reading a short post than five, ten or even more to digest a much longer paper. If you’re writing for people who really need to know something then longer articles are the way to go since there’s a limit to how much you can fit into a short summary. There’s also the middle road where you write both short and long posts to attract large readership and to also cater for a smaller but more interested subset seeking a deep understanding of the subject matter. What exactly should be the perfect ratio of short and long articles is a matter of defining your audience, trying out different options, experimenting and then choosing what works best. This article should give you a good starting point but the final answer is up to you.

Related post(s)

• How to write a great blog post? (0)
• Today olivetalks celebrates three months (5)
• The 5 stages of bloggers (3)
• Blogging strategies: length, frequency and topics (3)
• How to feed Google properly (2)