What makes a blog effective? The answer isn’t very complicated. Readers need to be able to easily and intuitively find the valuable information they are looking for, comment on it, subscribe to it, and share it with others.
Pretty straightforward stuff … right?
Surprisingly however, a lot of blogs are complex and difficult to navigate, restrict comments, and lack desired share tools. In this post I will give you 4 steps to optimize your blog.
Step 1: Usability
Make it easy to read and easy to follow. Your blog should be comfortable to the first time reader feel like a good find. If they chose to leave, it should be because they are looking for different content, not because they couldn’t sort through yours.
Step 2: Share-ability
Is the reader able to easily share what they read in your blog. If sharing is difficult, or if there are no share tools, then most readers will just move on and the opportunity to increase your audience will be lost. This is probably the simplest of the four steps, but one of the most important.
Share tools should be easily found on the blog home page and on every post. The most common social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google + should be at the top or bottom of every page so readers can easily share your post with their friends.
Step 3: Functionality
The function of a successful blog is to create readship and response. Response may be sharing with other, or commenting on your post. Each blog should encourage discussion, participation, and sharing. Response can also be readers subscribing to your blog to follow via RSS or Feedburner. This is critical because it builds your audience and increases your reach. Try to think through all the ways a potential reader may want to interact with your blog, then go through and try to do each one yourself. Is it easy? Is it intuitive? Could it be made simpler, easier, or more intuitive? Then adjust as needed.
Step 4: Delivery
If readers only find your content by checking occasionally on your page, you have no ability to sustain an interested following. People are just too busy and frankly don’t spend their day thinking about you. However, if they subscribe to your blog and your valuable content comes to them regularly, they will read, respond, and share the topics that peak their interest. Think of your feed, be it RSS, email, Google Reader etc, as your own blog post delivery service, taking your content to the people who want it when it’s fresh off the presses.
The Take Away
At the end of the day you want to do everything possible so that when a new reader finds your blog they are easily able to read it and respond in the way that seems best to them. It is all about making it fun and convenient for the reader.
Make full use of these four steps to put your best foot forward with every potential reader.
