Seconds! That’s all you’ve got to hook your website visitor to stay.
You want visitors to your website and you want them to stay, but with the average website visit lasting less than a minute and many visitors leaving in between 10 – 20 second lots of websites aren’t cutting the mustard.
In this blog, I’m going to share how to use your blog to keep visitors to your website hanging around for longer so you can increase your average visitor time and make your blog more effective in getting you leads and clients.
I’ll be answering questions like:
- How can I write an opening paragraph to hook and draw them into my blog?
- What can I do to make my blog easier to read for my website visitor?
- Does the font I use in my blog make a difference?
- What about text size?
- Does the background I use make them want to stay or leave?
- What else can I do to increase the average time my readers spend on my blog and my website?
Make a good start
How can you write an opening paragraph to hook and draw your reader into your blog?
- Use The ‘You’ Opening
This is a blog opening paragraph idea I learned from Henneke Duistermaat.
This is one of her fab examples:
Do you ever read back a draft of your writing and wonder what happened?
Red-cheeked, you thought your draft was complete. You felt excited. Brimming with enthusiasm. You knew it … this was going to be superb. Probably your best-ever blog post. Yay!
You poured yourself a beer, feeling elated with your success.
Any minor editing and proofreading could wait until the next day.
But, the next day … you feel disappointed. Your writing sounds bland. Your sentences seem to stutter.
What can you do?
How can you create a smooth and enjoyable reading experience? How can you make your content dazzle and dance?
Let’s explore four ways …
And so she seamlessly and easily leads the reader into the useful and helpful parts of her blog.
Genius!
2. Use an interesting fact or stat to draw them in
Why does this work?
It works because it makes the reader curious and if the fact, the data or the statistic is relevant to their problem it’s way more likely to draw them in.
They may be shocked by the information too so want to find out more.
3. The empathy opening paragraph
Questions around the problem the reader is experiencing shows you understand.
Aim to get them nodding in agreement with you.
If you help parents with toddlers that are fussy eaters you could start a blog something like this:
Are you worn out battling with your toddler at every meal time?
Fed-up hearing how your friend’s toddler eats everything put in front of them?
Are you starting to feel like mealtimes are a battleground and it will NEVER get any easier no matter what you do?
Oh, I totally understand.
Mealtimes with my toddler used to be a nightmare! I’d wrack my brains trying to work out what I was doing wrong, spend hours on the internet looking for recipes they’d happily eat and pick the brains of all my friends in the hope of mealtimes becoming a fun time.
Nope! Nothing I did worked.
The screaming continued.
The food throwing continued.
Until I realised the problem was me and this is what I did to fix it.
Make your blog easier to read
We don’t read everything in front of us on a screen.
We scan.
So your blog needs to consider your reader.
Make it easy for them.
Make it an easy decision for them to keep on reading.
Ditch walls of text
A wall of text can put the most avid blog reader off.
Break up your content.
Use short sentences.
And use easy to understand language so it doesn’t feel like a huge effort to read.
Pop some words in bold too.
Line spacing for your blog
Have your lines spaced out so your blog is easy to read too. Lines too close or too far apart can make it tricky to read
And consider the width of your sentences too.
You don’t want your reader getting neck strain if your blog is the width of their screen.
Let them read it without having to move their head from side to side.
Font
Is the font you’re using easy or difficult to read?
Stick to fonts that are easy to read.
And be sure your text is a size that’s easy to read too.
The minute your reader has to work out what you’re saying, they’re off.
Colour
Are the colours you’re using easy to read?
It can be wise to stick with black. It’s the easiest to read.
Use colours that stand out for your headings, sub-headings and bullet points.
If your brand colours stand-out use them.
Background
You want to avoid making your visitor’s eyes tired by working too hard, so black copy on a white background or a pale background is what’s preferred by most website visitors.
Use Images in Your Blog
Images are fab in blogs.
Images are great at breaking up text and they also make it more interesting for the reader.
Images you can add to your blog to improve your reader’s experience:
- Infographics
- Quotes
- Stats
- Screenshots
- Diagrams
- Graphs
- Charts
- Pictures of you (let them get to know the writer of the blog)
- GIF’s
- Videos
What else can I do to increase the average time my readers spend on my blog and exploring my website?
If you’ve got other blogs on the topic or relate to the blog, include links to them in the blog itself
Or
Add the options of related blogs at the end of your blog.
You could say something like
If you’ve found this blog useful, you’ll want to check these blogs out too:
And add the links to your blogs so your reader can keep on exploring your fab blogs.
This is a great way to keep someone on your site for longer as they go from one page to another reading or watching your useful and helpful content.
Avoiding sales based content
You want to become known as the solver of our audience’s problem so we can be inclined to share valuable content. Content that’s useful and helpful
But our content plan needs to include our sales based content.
A content plan without sales based content can fall short of getting you leads and clients.
Include in your content plan:
Content that:
- Offers your products or services
- Answers questions our audience has about our products or service
- Answers their objections they have about our products or service
- We can’t assume our audience will get in touch to buy if we don’t talk about what we offer.
Want to know more about how to make your marketing and blog more fantabulous?
Here’s some more blogs for you:
Why blogging is an effective way to create your consistent flow of enquiries, leads and clients
How to create awesome blogs that turns your website into a lead generating machine
THE MONDAY MORNING MARKETING MEMO
Motivation in your inbox
Get better at marketing with actionable marketing tips and advice you can implement each week to improve your online presence so you can get more leads and clients.