Business and Blogging

How To Get Your Reader’s Attention . . .

by Laura Spencer on May 15th, 2008

When I wrote Tuesday’s post on the crowded blogosphere, I had no idea of the can of worms that I was opening.

While most commentators seem to agree that there is still room on the Internet for good content, after I wrote that post I ran across two additional posts that really emphasized the nature of the problem.

• The first post is from Yvonne Russell over at Grow Your Writing Business. In her post titled Keep The Noise Down - Looking For A Quiet Space In A Web 2.0 World quantified the problem that I described using statistics gleaned from the BlogWorld & New Media Expo home page. Exactly how crowded is the blogosphere - based on the statistics given here, the blogosphere is VERY crowded.
• The second post is from Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb. In her post titled Too Many Choices, Too Much Content Sarah describes how there is an overload, not only of blog posts, but also of social media tools to organize blog posts. (Ironically, I found Sarah’s article through my account on Second Brain, which is yet another social media organization tool.)

Is there a name for all of this clutter?

Of course there is. It’s called information overload.

Getting Your Reader’s Attention

How can you make sure that your business blog gets your customer’s attention in such a crowded environment?

The answer is to make it easy for your customer.

I have a little confession to make. I look at literally hundreds of blog posts every day. I would like to say that I thoroughly read all of those blog posts, but that would not really be true. What I really do is scan them to see if they are worth reading.

Those blogs that pass the scan test are the ones that get a thorough read. Those are the blogs that I pass on to others, link to in posts like this one, and submit to social bookmarking sites. The rest of the blog posts that I look pretty much get ignored.

For most businesses, creating scannable blog posts is a must if you want your posts to reach your targeted customer.

I use specific techniques to make my posts more scannable. Your business blog can use them too. Here are four quick tips that I use to make my posts scannable:

• Graphics. You’ll notice that I almost always include a graphic with my blog posts. That’s because a good graphic can capture a reader’s attention and draw them into the text.
• Short paragraphs. Today’s blog reader doesn’t have time to read long chunks of text. Forget what your English teacher taught you and break long paragraphs into shorter ones.
• Formatting. You’ll notice that I use a lot of formatting to break up the page. Boldface, italics, and bulleted lists all make a post more scannable.
• Headline. Many would argue that the headline is the most important part of your business blog post. In fact, the headline is so important that numerous bloggers have devoted whole posts to writing good ones.

A business blog should still be a vital part of your marketing strategy. By paying attention to the principles above, you can make your business blog posts stand out and reach your customers and potential customers.

How are you doing?

Does your business blog contribute to the overload, or is it easy for your readers to scan?

Image Source: www.sxc.hu

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POSTED IN: Blogging, Marketing, Small Business, Web 2.0