It is really disappointing that after weeks or months of meticulous planning and finally launching your blog, you struggle to get it off the ground because no one is reading your content.
Every new blogger is guilty of making mistakes, some of which make it hard for their new blogs to get readers. Some mistakes are easy to fix while others take time and need patience.
But first, you need to identify why no one is reading your blog.
This matters because you’ve invested a lot of resources, be it time spent doing research, paying for services such as web hosting, or paying for premium blogging tools. You need your blog to succeed and start generating income.
So, what could you have done wrong?
Below we highlight seven reasons why no one is reading your blog and how you can fix each problem.
1: Your blog is not mobile responsive
It’s super annoying to visit a blog with great content only to find that it’s not mobile responsive, forcing you to shift the content from left to right as you read.
As a blogger, you should understand that we live in a mobile-dependent generation. We carry our smartphones everywhere we go and is our go-to device to stay connected with friends, family, and workmates.
As of 2021, 63% of Google searches in the United States were done on mobile devices.
Take the necessary steps to ensure your blog is mobile-friendly as this will boost the user’s experience when reading your blog.
Google also states that User Experience is one of its ranking factors. It states: “Pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as high”.
Use Google’s Mobile Friedly Testing Tool to check if your blog is mobile responsive.
2: You’re not promoting your blog
It doesn’t matter how well-researched, insightful, and eye-opening your content really is if people can’t see it. You need to promote your blog if you wish to grow your blog’s traffic.
Promote your new blog posts on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. You can consider using paid ads if you have a marketing budget.
Another way to promote your blog is through email marketing. Start by building an email list then send email notifications whenever you publish a new post or update an old one.
Email marketing tools such as Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Drip, Moosend, and Hubspot help build and manage email lists.
According to reports, email marketing is 40 times more effective at acquiring new leads and customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.
3: You’re inconsistent
This is one blogging mistake you do not want to make, especially if your blog is new.
Consistency is a major factor if you wish to have a successful blog and enjoy passive income enough to take care of all your needs.
Just like consistently showing up for gym sessions to get your dream lean, well-toned body and stay fit, maintaining a consistent posting schedule keeps readers in the loop long enough to form a lasting relationship with you and/or your blog.
Use social media platforms consistently, have a consistent schedule for publishing new content, and do the same when sending your newsletters.
It’s ideal to use an editorial calendar to plan your blogging tasks and social media scheduling tools to stay consistent on social media platforms.
4: You only blog about yourself
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but no one actually cares that much about your personal life.
No one cares about your morning routine, favorite meal, hobbies, favorite tv shows, and everything in between.
People care about how you can help them. In this case, they care about how your blog will help them solve the problems they have.
It could be someone looking for a freelance writing guide and how to land well-paying clients, a college graduate looking for interview guides in preparation for a job interview, or even a stay-at-home mom looking for work-from-home jobs that pay well.
In a nutshell, focus on helping your readers with the challenges they’re facing.
Before you hit the “publish” button, ask yourself this:
- Of what value is this article to my readers?
That’s the quickest way to tell if an article will be of any value to your readers.
5: Your blog is too slow
You’re likely to lose 40% of blog visitors if your blog is loading slowly and takes more than three seconds for content above the fold to load fully.
Slow websites cause poor user experience, something which goes against Google’s goal of serving its users with useful pages with a great user experience.
Test your blog’s loading speeds using tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, and GTmetrix.
You can do the following to improve your blog’s page speed:
- Use a caching plugin
- Use a CDN such as Cloudflare
- Compress images
- Use lazy load plugin
- Migrate your blog to a faster web hosting provider
Note: Some web host providers have their own custom CDNs.
Keep in mind that page speed is also an important Google ranking factor. Your rankings will drop if you do not fix your blog’s slow loading speed.
6: Your blog isn’t optimized to rank
Another possible explanation as to why no one is reading your blog could be a failure on your part to optimize each page to rank for specific search terms.
Users use search engines to search for information. They enter a search query and in return, they’re shown the most appropriate results based on what they searched.
In order for your blog to generate organic traffic from search, you should optimize each blog post for specific search phrases and their related terms.
Learn about how to do on-page SEO and make sure search engines can crawl and index your blog content. Make sure there’s no “no-index” tag on any page you want indexed and ranked.
If you’re a new blogger with little knowledge about SEO, I recommend using basic SEO plugins such as RankMath or YoastSEO to optimize your articles.
Make sure to optimize meta titles and meta descriptions to boost organic clicks, which in turn increases your traffic and ultimately rankings.
This article about catchy blog titles will help you understand how to craft a perfect meta title for your blog posts.
7: Your blog is visually unappealing
Psychology studies indicate that it takes just seven seconds of meeting someone to form a solid first impression about them.
The same goes for your blog and/or blog posts. It’s a huge turn-off if your blog looks unorganized, sloppy, or uses color combinations that put off readers.
Content with lots of irrelevant sentences or statements, large blocks of texts or long paragraphs, too many ads, and hard-to-read font style or size will disappoint your readers. They will opt to find a blog with a user-friendly design.
Use proper formatting, short and simple sentences, short paragraphs, relatable examples, table of contents, and media such as screenshots, infographics, and videos.
A study by Buffer shows that adding a featured image on blog posts boosts retweets on Twitter by 150% and likes on Facebook by 53%. Make your content visually attractive.
In another study by Springer, using a combination of text and illustrations (such as infographics) to give directions yields better results by 323%.
Here’s a simplified blog post checklist you can use to make sure each piece of content you publish has a high chance to rank.
To wrap up
As I said, almost every blogger makes one or a few of these mistakes when they launch their first blog. I did and it took me time to learn from my mistakes. So, make adjustments if you’re making any of these common mistakes.
That said, which of these mistakes did you make and how were you able to break free and grow your blog to success?
