Many marketers and brands will agree that maintaining a blog is an essential part of a successful online marketing strategy. This is not surprising at all considering that blogs are among the channels where consumers get to know more about the products and services that they favor. If you maintain a blog for your brand, chances are, you are aware what a well written blog can do to increase the visibility of your business online. However, if you notice that the traffic on your blog has significantly reduced, or even worse, many of your blog visitors are scurrying away without taking the time to finish the first paragraph of your post, it is possible that your blog is not as user-friendly as you think it is. Below are some of the blunders in your blog that send your visitors away and how you can address them.

Design is too complex

Design is one area of your brand’s blog where simpler is better. If visitors to your blog need to tinker on things or press too many buttons to get their way around the site, then you are giving them the reason to leave immediately. To avoid this from happening, make sure that you incorporate only those items in your design that you deem necessary. At the most, you want your visitors to click around your blog with ease so that they can find the information they are looking for without any trouble.

Design is boring

Similar to an all too complex design, a blah blog design can be a major turnoff for visitors simply because it sends the message that you do not take the time to develop a blog that represents your business. As a rule of thumb, you need to find the perfect balance in your blogs design. Use the right amount of graphic elements that will draw visitors to your blog and at the same time use fonts and colors that strongly convey the message of your brand.

Blog takes forever to load

Regardless how much time and effort you spend to come up with an excellent blog post, all these will go to waste if your blog takes several minutes to load. Simply put, prospective readers are usually impatient because the Internet is so vast and they can’t wait for one blog to load when they have other blogs to read in their list. A slow load time can also have a significant impact on your blog’s search ranking, so make sure that you have someone check your blog’s load speed and address possible factors that contribute to the problem such as plugins, image size, excess tracking scripts, etc.

To many with ads

There is nothing wrong with having advertisements on your blog. However, if the banners, links and pop-ups are already crowding the page, no reader would want to spend time dealing with such annoying advertisements. If you have to put up advertisements, make sure that you limit their number. Also, if you are displaying pop-up ads, setting cookies and timers correctly will prevent them from appearing all the time.

Post Headlines are not interesting

Keep in mind that your posts’ headlines are the most important parts of your articles. Why? Because majority of readers use headlines to determine whether to continue reading your article or not. Therefore, when writing headlines, learn to play on words and make sure that they provide a solution to a specific issue. The more compelling your headlines are the higher the chance that visitors will stay longer on your blog to read the rest of your content.

Content is not relevant

Suppose your blog has a quality design and you came up with a killer headline. However, your content can still mess things up. Keep in mind that a great looking blog will not compensate for a crappy content. Hence, make sure that you provide content that is relevant, inspiring or entertaining to readers. Stay focused on topics that you are truly fond of writing and make sure that everything flows consistently. Throw in some visuals to add spice to your articles. Once you tie all these things together in your post, you can expect your readers to keep coming back for more.

The article above was penned by one of the regular contributors of RFK Print Solutions www.rfkprintsolutions.com an online print shop specializing in litho printing. The company also offers a wide variety of printing products such as business cards and stationery, leaflets and flyers.

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