Does your Blog Captivate

Have you ever done any door to door sales? If you have, you know it’s a tough racket unless you have a knack for selling and develop the skills needed to be successful at selling door to door. I did some door to door sales when I was in college several years ago and after about a month I realized that I had about 15 to 30 seconds to captivate whomever it was that opened the door in order to get my message across and make a sale. It’s pretty much the same with your blog or website. When someone lands on your site you have a very narrow window to grab their attention and turn them into a new reader.

There are several things that go into grabbing the attention of readers so let’s go through a few.

Are you writing compelling content?

Let’s face it, content is the King (or Queen) of blogs. People read blogs for the content. If you’re not writing great content, you will lose many readers over time. This is something you will have to work at to improve. Outside of your own original content here are a couple things you can do to get fresh quality content on your blog.

• Hire writers to write for your blog. Either paying them or find people that want to guest blog for a free plug to their blog.
• Trade Articles with other bloggers in your niche. Do a one for one swap of original articles. This can provide both blogs with new fresh content and a different point of view. Just make sure the articles are original and new.
• Subscribe to as many blogs in your niche as you can. By reading other blogs in your niche you can see what’s hot and get new ideas to elaborate on.

Does your Blog stand out?

I have a lot of people ask me to visit their blog and tell them what I think of it. When I arrive at the Blog the first thing I am hit with is one of the WordPress Themes I see on thousands of other blogs and it just doesn’t strike me as having its own identity. If your serious at all about blogging then spend some time getting a theme that portraits the image you want. You don’t have to spend much for this. I have taken free themes and had them modified to my liking by hiring someone on Script Lance or eLance for as little as $25.

You can also spice up the look of your blog with images and video to keep things visually interesting. I frequently use an inline image in posts to help tell the story and spice up the look a bit.

Does your blog tell me what it’s about?

Lastly I want to touch upon one last thing in creating a captivating blog. Does your blog tell your audience what it’s about? Either in the name or in a small snippet somewhere toward the top? The name Blogging Tips tells me exactly what the blog is about. Tips on better Blogging. But if the name of your blog doesn’t have a descriptive name you should add a tag line or small description so your readers know what the blog is about, without having to dig for it. This will greatly increase reader retention and subscribers.