Bloggers often commit these silly mistakes while writing a post on their blog that after being published, costs them a good deal of their readership. Before publishing your post, make sure you have edited your post keeping these 10 ways to discourage anyone from reading your post, in your mind, so that you don’t suffer with your readership and traffic.
Before we start discussing these points, let us know that these disasters can start happening at two stages:
- While a reader runs a casual eye over your post…
- While a reader actually reads your post…
When a reader runs a casual eye over your post:
It is but natural for a reader to take a look at the form and format of any post on a blog before he actually starts reading it. What can ruin your efforts put into a blog post and discourage anyone to read your post then or anytime in the future:
- Inappropriate Title:
The very first thing that is noticed about a post is its title. Usually, the title to a blog post is highlighted from the content of the post as an heading, thicker and more easily spotted than anything else. By the title being inappropriate, I mean the title being non-descriptive regarding the content of your post. If your title says “Preparing for your daughter’s wedding 10 years later”, no one is going to read your post even if it talks about how to make money online and save it for future. - A Lengthy Post:
Don’t write a very lengthy post unless each and every word that makes a long post is meaningful. It is OK to have a long post if it loses meaning or fails to convey your idea, if made any shorter. Posts that look too long to be read comfortably in one go have full chances to be overlooked by a reader. - Unformatted Post:
No one is going to read your post if its not properly formatted into paragraphs and points. Highlight the important parts by converting them into different forms of headings according to their importance, add the references from other sources to a block-quote. Use indents to separate a piece of code from the rest of the content. Use bold-face fonts for highlighting important words in your post. An unformatted post looks nothing more than utter confusion and discourages a reader from reading it at the first look itself! - Font Color & Size:
The post should look readable if you want it to be read by anyone. The color of the text should be in considerable contrast with the page background. But this doesn’t mean that you can use dark yellow as text color on light pink background! Similarly, be sensible while choosing the font size for paragraph content and the headings. They should be fairly distinct but also keep in mind, not to use a font so small that a reader needs a microscope to read it or so big that the earth starts seeming shorter than an O.
When a reader actually reads your post:
Supposing that you don’t make any of the above stated errors or a reader just overlooked them and started reading your post some way, the following ways can potentially discourage your readers for committing the same mistake again:
- Bad Introduction:
Introducing your reader to the subject of your post in a few lines, is a brilliant idea. But if it is not done right, can very much kill the essence of your post and brutally rape your readership statistics. The perfect idea is not to make a story about your story itself, but just define or introduce the concept to be discussed in your post. If this post is about 10 ways to discourage anyone from reading your post, then I don’t think its necessary to say anything else than that this post is about some mistakes that bloggers commit while writing and the two stages in which it happens. It would be a bad idea if I start explaining all these points in the introduction and then listed them later in the post! - Grammar and Punctuation:
No one likes to read a post that is ill-punctuated and grammatically unsound beyond comprehension. I have faced this problem in my earlier days into blogging as English is not my first language but excuses make no reasons when you fail. Learn and improve as you move on. If you don’t write well, get your post reviewed and edited by someone else rather than publish it as it is, only to destroy your readership. - Inappropriate content:
An interesting title but totally irrelevant content is big tun-off. Something that don’t convey your ideas and thoughts as clearly as it should is surely going to discourage anyone from reading your posts any time in future. Talk only about the subject of your post, be specific and to the point. Don’t make stories of princes and palaces to explain technology, blogging, sports, or anything of such sort. You get what I mean. - Inline Advertisements:
Using ads inside a post along with the content is not a very good idea. Inline ads are quite a distraction and take away the user from what you are trying to convey in your post. An ugly ad may spoil the taste of a reader, and an ad more interesting than your post will certainly carry a reader away. Personally, I don’t like those 2-3 words fitting in a tight space over a few lines and I am not comfortable in reading such posts. - Videos with no description:
Posting videos with no textual description can discourage readers from going through your post as not everyone has a fast internet connection and not everyone has the time to wait for your video to load and then watch it. Clear the idea brought out in the video as textual description so that not-so-lucky readers may not miss the content in its entirety.
Combined, these 9 points are the 9 ultimate ways to discourage anyone from reading your blog. Wait! Am I missing something? Was it 10 ways I was going to talk about?
Well, the tenth, and the most powerful way to discourage anyone from reading your post is to use any of the above 9 ways to discourage your readers. Got any more ideas? Drop them in the comments and share with us.