Increase Your Audience’s Spending Time on Your Blog

Millionaire's Digest
August 13, 2017October 7, 2017
Blogging
audience, Beauty, Beauty Products, beauty reviews, book, book reviews, Books, fiction, journal, Makeup, poem, poems, time, Writing
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Getting your audience to read your content is one thing, but getting them to stay is another. Now here’s what you can do to keep your audiences attention span:

1. Know what the readers want (and create it).

The best way to increase the amount of time your audience spends on your blog is simple: create material they want to read.

Knowing what articles are most highly read and what on the site gets the most attention can help organizations create material that will grab and keep audiences focused, increasing the amount of time spent reading. Is it content that is humourous? Colorful infographics? Know what is popular and keep doing it!

Read: 2 Quick Ways to Get More Engagement on Your Blog

2. Tell audiences how long the piece will take to read.

The more details audiences have about an article, the more likely they are to read it. Obviously this includes a headline and description of the article, but also consider listing how long a piece will take to read. Here on the Millionaire’s Digest, all our staff members who write for our readers have the average time included that it will take them to read their blog post.

Think about it this way: even if the headline is only moderately appealing, knowing the piece will take only two minutes to read will help encourage audiences to give it a chance, thus increasing the amount of time they spend reading overall.

Use online tools to help calculate how much time a piece will take to read. To keep things simple and easier for readers, consider rounding the time off to a whole number.

3. Make it shareable.

In today’s World, we seek out the approval of others when making decisions. This explains why audiences share so much on social media — they like something, but want the validation of friends and family.

Bloggers can take advantage of this by making content on their websites shareable. Allowing your audience to share items of interest to them, via social media, can help you reach a wider range of other audiences.

As a general rule, audiences have similar tastes as their friends and family, so a shared piece will get more reads. The idea is, “If my friends read that and liked it enough to share it, than chances are I will too.”

Read: The Paradox of What Makes Something Go Viral

4. Break it up.

The key here is to make content easy to read. If audiences lose interest or can’t keep up, they won’t spend very long reading something. To keep readers engaged for the entire length of an article, break it up into sections. Avoid long paragraphs and big walls of text and use short, concise thoughts, incorporating images wherever possible.

In addition, use bolded headers to draw audience attention and keep articles organized. Utilizing lists is a good way to increase the time audiences spend reading, as well. Lists help break articles down into sections and give readers a concrete idea of what they’re getting into.