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The idea that great content draws great traffic is a common misperception. Many website owners believe that all they need to generate traffic is great content.
While great content has the potential to attract visitors, you need more of a strategy than just slapping it on your website and waiting for people to come. Yet, I see website and blog owners making this mistake nearly every day.
A lot of really great content never gets read. In this post, I’ll explain why.
Why Nobody Sees Your Content
Great content means that your site has the potential to draw more visitors, but many website owners waste their investment in great content. Here are over seven content mistakes that I see often.
- No personality. Studies have shown repeatedly that people want to interact with people. If you want people to interact with your site, your content needs to show who the author is. This is especially true for blogs, since blogging is essentially an online conversation and a conversation takes at least two.
- No social media plan. Every successful high traffic site has a social media plan. They know how to use social media to target their audience and how to establish an effective social media presence. They also make it easy for their readers to reshare their content through effective use of social media sharing buttons.
- Badly designed site. Great content placed on a badly designed website is a recipe for failure. The Internet is a highly visual medium. Readers expect that the content on a well-designed site will be good and that the content on a badly designed site will be bad. This means that good content will be overlooked on badly designed sites.
- Badly formatted content. Effective Internet content follows a unique set of conventions designed especially for online readers. What works well in newspapers and magazines doesn’t work for the Worldwide Web. Good content that isn’t designed with online readers in mind is usually ignored.
- Ignoring comments. By nature, the Internet is designed for interaction. Online readers and especially blog readers expect to be able to respond to what they read and they expect the content author to be right there with them, engaged in the conversation. Yet, too many website owners miss the importance of comments or worse yet, turn them off.
- Poor site navigation. Another reason great content gets ignored is because the reader can’t find it. It may be buried beneath a pop-up ad, or hidden on a cluttered home page. The bottom line is the same. If a visitor to your site can’t find the content, they won’t read it.
- Forgetting about search engines. Search engines are still an important means for finding information on the web. While content should never be written just to game a search engine algorithm, if you want your content to be found you should understand what the search engines like to see and what they don’t like.
- Bonus reason: Ignoring mobile readers. The number of people accessing websites through mobile devices has grown significantly. Some experts predict that soon most people will use mobile devices to access the Worldwide Web. Yet, a surprising number of popular websites and blogs fail to take the needs of mobile readers into consideration.
Your Turn
Have you had a problem getting your great content in front of your target audience? What additional questions do you have?
5 responses so far ↓
1 Matt Keegan // Oct 9, 2012 at
Definitely, No. 8 is something that can no longer be ignored. One of my sites has an old theme layout and I’m sure it isn’t doing as well as it could compared to a mobile-ready site. Social media is another aspect to blog performance — it is almost requirement that every article be tweeted, liked on Facebook, stumbled or otherwise shared.
2 Laura Spencer // Oct 10, 2012 at
Matt,
I think a lot of people are in that same boat. And it amazes me that I still see blog posts with no way of sharing on any form of social media.
3 Karen Cioffi // Oct 15, 2012 at
Hi, Laura, Thanks for the useful information. I get okay traffic, but can’t seem to get the readers and visitors to comment too much. With an accounting background, I think I make my posts more business like. I’ll have to work on that.
Oh, I tried to subscribe to your posts via email, but was told it’s not enabled. Thought you’d like to know.
4 Laura Spencer // Oct 16, 2012 at
Hi Karen,
I am trying to fix the button. In the meantime,
1) Click the orange RSS Feed button.
2) Select Get WritingThoughts delivered by email from the box on the upper right.
3) Enter email into the pop-up window.
4) Verify that you are a human.
This process seems to work.
5 Ferb // Oct 26, 2012 at
Hi Laura,
That was a big mistake I made, just trying hard to grab as great content as possible and waiting for people to come. But Could you please explain more about the social media plan? I believed Social Media is a great place for people to build relationship so I’d really love to hear more about it.
Thank you – Ferb