When You Need To Get Hooked On A Blog, Here’s What to Do: a blog about writing blogs that people are hooked on reading.
When You Need To Get Hooked On A Blog, Here’s What to Do: a blog about writing blogs that people are hooked on reading.
When You Need To Get Hooked On A Blog, Here’s What to Do: a blog about writing blogs that people are hooked on reading.
When You Need To Get Hooked On A Blog, Here’s What to Do: a blog about writing blogs that people are hooked on reading.
When You Need To Get Hooked On A Blog, Here’s What to Do: a blog about writing blogs that people are hooked on reading.
When You Need To Get Hooked On A Blog, Here’s What to Do: a blog about writing blogs that people are hooked on reading.
When You Need To Get Hooked On A Blog, Here’s What to Do: a blog about writing blogs that people are hooked on reading.
It’s a long way from the first blog post to getting hooked on the blog.
The King is dead. Long live the King.
In this case, he’s been dead a while. The last blog post was in 2011 and the domain it was posted to expired in 2012. But it wasn’t until this past week that I finally made the decision to kill it off for good and just do a straight redirect to its replacement, a new blog with an old name.
And as much as I want to say that I’m sad about the loss of the old blog, I really am not. It had become an albatross around my neck, something that needed to be taken care of but which I simply didn’t have time for, and now it’s gone and I don’t need to worry about it anymore.
But why is it that so many blogs get started and then abandoned? Why is it that so many blogs are started with great enthusiasm but then fall by the wayside within a few short months or even weeks?
That’s what this post is all about: how to design your blog so that you can get hooked on blogging for years to come.
I’ve always liked the idea of keeping a blog. It seems like an easy way to get started writing and to build an audience for your writing. But at the same time, it’s hard to imagine getting any readers. Like most people, I have a mental list of blogs I read regularly. But when I try to think about how those blogs got their initial readers, I don’t really know.
I’ve tried starting a few times in the past, but I always gave up after a couple weeks. If you want people to read your blog, you need to update it regularly. You can’t just write a single post and leave it at that. So there’s something you have to be willing to do long-term before you even know if anyone is going to read it.
So how do you get hooked on something like that? How do you get hooked on anything? Interestingly, there is a well-known series of articles on just this topic: Paul Graham’s essays How To Be An Expert In Anything, Maker’s Schedule Manager’s Schedule, and Good and Bad Procrastination. The thesis of these essays is that there are two parts to becoming an expert at anything: doing it (obviously), and reading about it. And you have to do
I have a blog, but no one is reading it. I need to get more people reading my blog. How do I do that? The simple answer is: write good stuff. But even when you do that, it’s not enough. There are millions of blogs out there, and good stuff abounds.
So what else should you do? Here are 6 tricks for getting people hooked on your blog:
1.) Make your posts short and sweet. People don’t want to read huge chunks of text in their spare time. They do want to get quick takeaways from whoever they’re following.
2.) Put the most important ideas up front. We’re so used to skim-reading that we hardly ever actually read anymore. If you don’t put the most important ideas front and center, the reader will never see them.
3.) Use subheadings to break up your content into digestible chunks. This makes your content easier to scan, which is exactly what skim-readers want to do!
4.) Don’t write long paragraphs. This makes it really hard for skim-readers to find what they’re looking for quickly, and they’ll probably just bounce off your page without even trying to find it. Long paragraphs also make your content
A blog is a new medium. This means that what works best for blogs is different from what used to work best in older media, like print.
This difference has not yet sunk in, so when people write blogs they tend to try to do it the way they were taught to write for print. This doesn’t work very well.
If you want people to read what you’ve written, and take action as a result, the most important trick is to hook them.
Hooking people is a skill that can be learned. It’s based on psychology, but it’s a practical kind of psychology that can be applied without a license or years of training. This essay explains how to use it.
The standard advice for writing well goes something like this: “Write about something you know about; make your points clearly; and keep it interesting.” That’s good advice as far as it goes, but if you’re trying to hook your readers, there are two more tricks that will help. The first trick is to get their attention; the second is to keep them from getting bored and giving up too soon.
1. Make it about something people actually care about
2. Write something that people want to share
3. Tell a story
4. Have your own voice
5. Be real
6. Be helpful
7. Be remarkable