I have a saying.
I don’t blog as a hobby.
I say that because it’s easy to start a blog with the intention of making money, but to protect your ego you say things like “I’m just doing this for fun” or “It’s just a side project.”
Nah. This is for money. This is to help people. This is to do something special.
That’s why I always treat blogging as a business. I don’t see it any other way.
And for that to happen you need to learn how to create a blog that people will read.
It’s way too easy to fall into the trap of believing that just because you put in the time to create something you deserve recognition for it.
Maybe we kept that lesson as a child where we would color outside of the lines, show our parents, and they would shower us with praise.
That doesn’t happen with blogging. With blogging you have to bring the goods and those goods have to be better than whatever everyone else is bringing.
So how do you do that? Great question.
Let’s answer it.
How to Create a Blog That People Will Read: The Secret
When I first started to blog I figured that my brilliant writing would carry the day.
I wrote blog posts for 90 days and had a whopping 1,200 pageviews. That’s a sign that my writing wasn’t going to carry anything.
Maybe a fart. That was it.
However, on day 91 something changed. And from there I realized a simple truth.
I wasn’t writing things that people wanted to read.
Here’s the thing. You can’t believe that someone will just randomly read your content.
You have to understand what people are searching for or interested in if you want them to even CONSIDER reading your content.
That’s not an option. It’s something that you MUST do. For those first 90 days I was writing stuff that I wanted to read.
On day 91 I published something that people were interested in reading and what they were searching for. Nobody cared about why I hated Instagram models. They cared about the facts of carbs and why they were keeping them large.
From there I only focused on content that I knew people were searching for.
How did I find that?
Finding Content that People Want
There are two main ways to do this. Okay, there are a ton, but the two ways that I talk about below are the easiest.
See What Works on Social Media
This is what I initially did because I was using Pinterest to promote my blog but this can work on almost any platform:
I found the content that was working really well by looking at the amount of repins it had. If it had a ton of repins then it would be a topic that I would write because that was obviously something that people cared about.
That was it. Simple.
Then when I got good at writing the stuff that was working on social media I moved on to SEO and that’s where things can get tricky for some people.
Search Volume
That’s when I would use SEO tools to find the search volume of different keywords.
If the volume was decent and not too generic (like “balloon”) then I would write about it.
Now, this goes against what a lot of people tell you to do for SEO, but the reality was that at some point I was going to write that content, why not make it today?
So that’s what I did.
However, understanding what people were searching for was only 10% of the battle. Where people take missteps with their SEO strategy is that they either write only for big search volume or very little search volume.
There needs to be a combination of things. For example, our Blogging Library is extremely comprehensive because Google loves topical authority and this is why we always create Topic Clusters.
That means within your Topic Cluster you’re going to have content that has a high search volume like How to Make Money Blogging and content with a very low search volume like this post.
The stuff with a high search volume also tends to be the stuff that does well on social media while the stuff with a low search volume is great to include in your emails.
But understanding what you need to write is only 10% of the battle.
The other 90% is where people fall flat.
You Have to Write Great Content
This is where we have to be real with each other. The majority of blogs out there suck.
They suck because their content sucks. None of us start off as good writers. It takes time and a lot of practice.
Eventually, you start to understand what it takes to keep people’s attention while also informing them.
When you can do that then you start to see some winners. Until that happens though, people AND search engines will ignore you.
It doesn’t matter if you follow all of the blogging best practices or know every single SEO tip out there. If your writing isn’t engaging in a way that keeps people on the page then they’ll leave.
Social media algorithms don’t want to show people content that they don’t care about and search engines aren’t going to show content that people quickly leave.
So get much better and learn how to write a blog post.
Tips for Getting People to Read Your Blog Content
There are some things that people easily miss when it comes to creating content that others will want to read. Let’s go over some of them.
Fix Your Design
The majority of people are going to read your blog on their phone. So make sure that it looks decent on your phone! This is why we love to use GeneratePress for all of our blogs.
Nothing makes me leave a site quicker than not being able to read it. There is no reason to struggle to read something when you can easily click the back button to find another result that is easier to consume.
Get to the Point Quickly
This one is tougher because when it comes to SEO it’s important to be thorough. But thorough doesn’t mean you can’t get to the point at the beginning.
People are looking for an answer to something and the sooner you can give it to them the better. That doesn’t mean you can’t take your time diving deeper into the answer for the rest of the blog post, but make sure people want to stick around.
Create a Library
I truly believe that all Creators should build a library. The reason for that is over the long run you want to be viewed as a valuable resource around a subject.
This doesn’t work when your content is sporadic and all over the place. When you build a library you give your audience a reason to stick around and consume your content.
More importantly, you give them a reason to come back.
Keep Your Head Down, Keep Writing
One of the frustrating things about blogging is that you really don’t know what piece of content is going to take off.
If you have an ego like myself then you’ll think that every piece is going to be the one that takes off.
It probably won’t, but that doesn’t mean that every piece of content that you publish won’t do its job.
If you do your research and understand what people want and then write about that stuff, then each piece of content should bring you some level of traffic and some is better than none.
More importantly, if you have things set up properly then every single person that comes to your site has a great chance of becoming a customer. This is why we focus so heavily on creating information products that help people move further along their journey.
Over time, when you have all of your content putting in work then you have yourself a nice traffic engine.
It just takes time to build it up and most people don’t want to build things up like that.
They want to create a successful blog overnight.
