After putting in hours of work, effort and resources to create a piece of content, one of the least rewards you can have is to get more views for your content without any more sweat.
This is the hope of every blogger, content creator, YouTuber etc. And frankly, every creator deserve optimum visibility for their content. Unfortunately, this isn’t the reality. A lot of blog posts and other content never get read or noticed by users.
In fact, according to a study by Ahref, more than 90 percent of all published content actually get zero traffic from Google.
Beyond being alarming, this stat can be quite disarming for any blogger, content creator or aspiring content creator.
Why your Content is not Getting Views
There are a number of reasons why your content isn’t getting a lot of readers. For example, some of the reasons could either be due to absence of SEO optimization for visibility, Inadequate use of focus keywords, Low page rank, Low quality post etc.
Seeing this, you might be wondering, what then can I do to create more views for my post?
In the following paragraphs, I’ll be sharing with you, the important steps you can take to drive more views for your content…
Create Exceptional Content
Table of Contents
In the virtual world, you have about 15 seconds to convince a user to continue reading your content. Within this short period, you can either lose or keep the user.
Your goal is to keep the reader. But, for you to actually convince a reader within that short period, your content has got to be really good and pretty much, what that user really wants at that point.
This means that one of the important steps to get more views for your blog posts is to understand your user demographics and then create the kind of content that appeals to them in an exceptional way.
In addition, you have to go beyond what others are doing. Create something that stands out in a way that makes them want to read it up as soon as they come across it.
Format your Post effectively
Formatting your content properly is an important step you can use to get more views or encourage more people to read through your blog posts.
To get started, put more thoughts into your post titles, post opening, meta tags and create meta descriptions that’s compelling.
For blog posts and other text content specifically, you don’t want to create a content that looks overwhelming. You want to create a post that is scan-able with short paragraphs and relevant white space. It encourages more users to read through.
Use bulleted points, highligted sub headings, paragraphs or numbering to further chunk down and give relevance to sections of your content.
For video content, to get more views and engagement, work on writing a written text or captions that creates a summary of your content even before a user views it.
This also help other users that might not have interest to see your video. It gives context to your content. Defines what the video is all about. And with that they can decide to view the video or not.
Work on your SEO
As cliché as it might sound, Search Engine Optimization still plays a very key role in content visibility. And done well, SEO can help you get more views for your content.
Start with optimizing your website/blog with relevant keywords. Afterwards, be sure to optimize each blog post you create with the appropriate keyword you want to rank for.
Understand the keywords that are relevant to your desired audience and work on incorporating them into your posts.
For video content creators and podcasters, whether on Instagram, YouTube or Tiktok, optimizing your videos and podcasts with well written text in your description and links will get you more visibility for your content.
When done well, this will subsequently improve the overall number of people that gets to actually see your content.
Find a Sub Niche
Beyond being appealing to your audience, you also have to be really exceptional if you want to get more views for your blog posts.
You have to create content that is in-depth, complete and able to fulfill your average user needs more than any other content in that niche.
Of course it can be a very tall ambition to try to outdo every other person in your niche. There’ll always be someone with more money or better resources to provide better content than you.
For these reasons, instead of focusing on directly taking over the industry, find a sub niche and take up your space. Be the big fish in a small pond.
Decide to be the best to the audience within this your sub niche. Doing this makes it easier for you to create thought leadership or become an authority in that smaller niche, compared to other niches with long existing experts.
Done well, you can leverage your expertise in the smaller niche to expand to the larger niche while building your brand.
Know your Audience Thoroughly
If you’re working on getting more readers for your blog posts then there is no use writing a 3000 word content to an audience that is interested in reading just 500 words post. And nothing more.
They won’t read your 3000 word articles. And you won’t get more views for your posts.
Same goes for video content. You don’t want to provide a 30 minutes video for an audience that can only afford to watch 3 minutes video. Regardless of how much value you want to share, it could be a total waste of time.
There are niches with an audience that needs a very short and brisk content with very nice visuals. There are other niches that need very long and detailed content with extensive links.
You need to understand your niche and users thoroughly to know the content format or length that works for them. This is very important if you want to get more views for your content.
To have a better understanding of your audience and the things that appeals to them, you can use different approaches including your analytics, questionnaires, direct posts etc.
Knowing their preferred content format or length helps you give them the kind of content they can care about. And when they care about your content, they will want to read it again and again.
Because in as much as there are millions of content out there, it is not easy looking for suitable content or websites all the time.
So, people prefer going back to what they are already comfortable with, except in very some cases. So you have to work your way to becoming a dependable content creator first.
Create Interesting Content
Naturally, there are some very boring topics out there which you as a content creator might not be able to do a lot about. But, one of the ways to get more views to your content is to get your readers to share it.
Considering that before a content can be shared, the readers have to feel that such content is relevant or interesting enough to be shared, you have to do everything to create an interesting content, regardless of how naturally boring the topic has got to be.
Humanify your content. If you’re running a personal blog, instead of sounding too formal, get a bit informal and relate with your audience through your posts in a way that they feel they are actually relating with another human.
Get across to your audience the way they want to. If you’re in a niche that prefers humor, be sure to include a dose of it through your content.
Learn fro great story tellers and other blogger that create interesting content. Understudy how they make their content interesting, getting readers to the edge of their seats and find a way to do that with your content.
Same thing goes for audio podcasts and Video content creators.
Find out from the radio and TV presenters, you feel are really outstanding. Study their presentation format, the interesting things about their content and find a way to include some in your own content presentation to make things look more interesting.
Be a Story Teller
The world loves stories. Everyone wants to listen to a good story. It stirs our minds and sometimes stories are things we can all relate to.
Sharing relatable stories through your content has a way of bringing out your human side. Sometimes, it can even heighten your audience’s perception of you as an expert.
Again, to get more views for your blog posts, try not to sound too over the top with your content. Break things down. If you’re writing a personal blog, relate to your audience like you would relate to your friend or sibling.
Try to sound human and humane in your content. Work on infusing your own personal story, experiences etc. to create an analogy, solidify your message or simply make a point.
Beyond selling your brand, your story humanifies your content, bringing out the human angle your audience can connect with. This is the one step to getting fans to you.
Create Controversial Posts
Like I mentioned earlier, beyond words of mouth, your content must be really exceptional if you truly want to get get more views.
A lot of content creators have gone out of their way to share opinion that challenges the status quo. Most have shared thoughts that sounds unusual and controversial in order to encourage people to see things from a different perspectives.
These are some of the things you can get to do with your brand to really stand out and get people talking. While i’ll not suggest you shouldn’t get controversial as a content creator, what’s important is that your controversy must be substantial.
You don’t want to create controversial content that will be merely criticized with negative backlash. You want to create content that will get people to think differently or put differently, the kind of content that can attract more views either for critical purposes or for the applause.
So for this reason, you want to create content that offers a new argument and different perspective. The kind of content that will divide the audience, challenge long held perspectives or create a cultural shift within your niche.
Try out New Stuff
One peculiar thing about most content creators is the desire to always stay put with what they’re best known for.
Truth is, there’s nothing wrong in trying new things. It doesn’t mean you have to stick with the new.
There’s nothing wrong in putting up a video content once in a while if you’re predominantly into text content or putting up a blog post or news paper article, once in a blue moon, if you’re all about videos.
Trying new things can help you discover a new audience preference or even opportunities that were unknown to you. It can also create a buzz or get you more views for your posts.
I still remember, the first time I told my audience about a text-to-audio post I released; my traffic surged. I garnered more than double the usual traffic to my blog on that particular day alone.
Same goes for most other platforms. The day I did my first remake of an old post on WordPress, the acceptance was overwhelming. I was completely surprised because I didn’t expect that.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong in trying new text format, posting on new platforms or trying different post length.
Whatever lessons you learn from trying out something different will further shape your content marketing process while helping you understand trends and your audience even better.
Share on Social Media
As bonus tips, if you want to get more views for your blog posts, try sharing your posts on social media, forums, comment on top blogs etc.
The more people get to see your posts on these platforms, the better your chances of getting them read.
At the end of the day, beyond creating visibility for your brand on social media, you can also drive direct traffic from social media, over to your website.
Work On your Loading Speed
To get more views for your content, make sure your website is loading at optimum speed.
We can focus on these other tips about content etc. but even if these other steps are taken and you still have a very slow website, you might not experience a lot of changes.
Slow loading websites are very detrimental to users. The longer it takes your website to load, the more a user clicks away from the website. If you want to get more views for your posts, you need to ensure that your website is loading very fast for the average user.
Conclusion
Aside from what you’ve read so far, there are so many other things you can do to get more views for your content. For example, there’s need to create a user interface that is attractive and suitable for users to want to stay longer on your website.
There’s need to build your brand outside your website and to work on marketing each piece of content you create. And of course, beyond this, you can learn the bolts and nuts about how to create content that gets more views by signing up for our content master class here.
There you have the easiest steps to get more readers for your content.
Now it’s your turn! Which of these steps are you currently using to get more readers to your blog? Drop your comments below…
No responses yet