5 Signs That Your Blog Posts Are Boring Your Visitors

Everywhere you look, you’ll see SEO professionals and webmasters telling you that the only way to succeed on the modern Internet is to produce a constant flow of content on your website’s blog. There’s just no other way to do it. Content attracts customers, and without customers, you can’t turn a profit.
So you put their advice into action. You’ve set up a blog and you’ve been publishing articles every week. Sometimes you even manage two or three posts per week. Yet your traffic barely blips and your search ranking hasn’t improved. Sure, you show up now and then on the first page, but you don’t get a lot of benefit from it. Your few readers simply aren’t converting. What gives?
Chances are, your blog posts just aren’t cutting it. Maybe they’re technically proficient. Maybe they’re factual. Still, they lack that certain something. They lack life, presentation, direction. They’re boring. Why are they so bland, and what can you do to fix it?

1. Your Headlines are Boring

Until you look at it the right way, generating headlines is a time-consuming and thankless task. It’s impossible to tell what headline might be a winner and what just churns the stomach. Thankfully, it’s possible to break down the idea headline into component parts. Take the headline for this very article. “5 Signs That Your Blog Posts Are Boring Your Visitors”

• A number. Readers love numbered lists. That’s why Buzzfeed has been so successful and why everyone plus your mother shares them on Facebook.
• A subject. “Signs,” in this case. In many cases, you’ll want an adjective as well. This post could have used “Distressing Signs” to further bring in the emotional impact.
• A keyword or topic. In this case, “boring blog posts” is the general subject.

Throw this formula together and tack on a promise at the end. “10 Crazy Reasons to Invest in SEO for Great Success” would be a catchy, compelling headline. You can vary the formula up a little, but make sure it has a hook. If your headlines look more like “A Study in Blog Title Attractiveness,” they aren’t very compelling.
Also, make sure your titles are shorter rather than longer. If they stretch on too long, they’ll be truncated by Google in the search results. Instead of “10 Great Reasons to Assist Your Local Animal Shelter,” you might end up with “10 Great Reasons to Ass…” in the search results. No one needs that.

2. Your Blog Looks Untrustworthy

You can have the best content in the world, but if it’s posted on a site that looks like it was made to be a front for the mafia, no one is going to engage with your posts or convert into a customer.
Minimize the number of ads surrounding your text. Limit them to a banner at the top and a sidebar, at most. If possible, cut out one of those. You’re not going to be making your money through advertising anyway, you’re making it through conversions. Never break up your content with an ad in the middle.
Also, make sure your site design is up to the current web standards. If your site looks like it was thrown together with Netscape Composer and has been languishing on a college free web space for fifteen years, it’s going to look abandoned.

3. Your Posts Sound Like Lectures

This one is all about tone. See how this post, so far, has had a down to earth tone? References to Netscape Composer, jokes about abbreviated assisting and a direct, casual approach are all calculated techniques to get you, the reader, to engage in what I, the writer, am saying. The post is created an atmosphere of casual authority. I know what I’m talking about, and I’m willing to share my wisdom with you.
This is the exact sort of voice you want to cultivate on your site. Of course, you’re going to want to tailor it to your audience. If you’re writing to people who expect formality, you don’t want to drop crude jokes. On the other hand, if you’re writing to people who expect casual jokes, you don’t want to sound too stuffy.
While you’re at it, make sure your posts are proofread before they go live. Typos and grammatical errors will kill the authority you’re working to cultivate. Fluency in the language is not something you can fake. This is also why you need to be careful hiring external ghostwriters; if they’re working from India or China, their fluency is going to be less than natural and your readers will be able to tell.

4. You’re Too Self-Promotional

Pop quiz; do you end every blog article with a paragraph about how your company provides a great product or service to solve the very problem you’ve been talking about throughout the whole blog post, even if it’s only vaguely connected at all? If so, cut it out. Just stop it. You’re doing no one any favors.

Self-promotional blog posts are essentially commercials. They don’t provide value to your users; they provide value to you. Your users, however, will read the first few paragraphs and stop if it’s too much like a commercial. Namedropping your own business throughout every post turns every post into promotional material and removes what value they had.
The goal of content is not to promote your product. It is to promote your brand as an authority and source of valid advice. Once users trust you to solve their problems, they’ll trust that you produce quality products or services. Only then will they investigate your products, on their own, by exploring your navigation links or sidebar ads. It’s your job to make the conversion process as visible and easy as possible, without forcing it into your content.

5. Your Posts are Visually Unappetizing

Every post needs something more than text. It needs life, vibrancy, appeal; the visual aspect.

• Keep your paragraphs short. Walls of words make the average web user’s eyes glaze over.
• Bold key points. Your readers aren’t reading, they’re skimming at best.
• Use subtitles and bullet points to emphasize information in a quick, easy to skim manner.
• Make your links colored or bolded as well, to stand out from the text.
• Include images that tie in with your content in some way, even if it’s just a sympathetic emotion or symbolic connection.

When you make your posts visually appealing, users will stick around to see if the content fits. If your content doesn’t look worth reading, your potential readers will back away and find something easier on the eyes.