Writing online articles and blog posts remains extremely popular and effective. But competition for attention is fierce. WordPress, the leading blog platform, powers 43% of the world’s websites. Its daily volume of 2.3 million posts suggests a global total of 5 million. 

Meanwhile, Orbit Media’s annual survey of bloggers shows competition for attention is leading to longer posts (up 70% over the past decade) and production time (60%). 

In such an environment, writers and publishers must use all available tactics to stand out. This guide highlights three of the most damaging mistakes, explains why they are made, and offers suggestions for avoiding the low-engagement traps. 

1. Ignoring ‘promotion’ until the end 

The biggest mistake writers make is focusing exclusively on their content and leaving thoughts about promotion until the end, or to someone else. It’s easy to understand why so many people fall into this trap – writing is hard enough without adding complications, and it is tempting to think that promoting the post should be another specialist’s job.  

It’s a bad mistake because it means the dozens of decisions made while writing the post do not consider how to maximise reader appeal. To fix this idea, think about your reading patterns. You will likely look at subject lines in your email inbox, scroll through your social network feeds, and use Google to find answers. When you get to a post, you will scan it for relevance before reading it. And you’ll do much of this on your mobile phone. 

Now, think about what happens when you write a post. Do any of those factors enter your mind when deciding what to write? Or do you just concentrate on getting your ideas down into a structure that makes sense? 

The harsh reality is that you won’t generate the engagement you deserve if you can’t come up with attention-grabbing headlines, content that can be easily scanned on a mobile, and social posts that ‘pop’. And, given short attention spans, the accent has to be on speed.

It’s extremely difficult to sort out promotion once the piece has been produced. If the original writer is responsible, they will likely be tired, possibly bored, and ready for something new. If the task falls to someone else, lacking detailed context, they will likely look for quick retrofitting fixes rather than fundamentally rework the piece.

How to fix this: Channel your inner online guru

The good news is that, deep down, we’re all experts in navigating digital content streams; we’ve had to become so to deal with information overload. You just need to channel that expertise. Start to do this by analysing your online behaviour:

• What makes you click on an email subject line in your inbox?
• What stops you from scrolling past a post in your social media feeds?
• What turns you off a post when you’re on your mobile? 
• What do you type into Google when you need an answer?

Doing this consistently will help you understand what makes posts stand out. You can then apply this knowledge to your work and more confidently discuss with others the best way of producing posts.

Further reading: This is what you need to know about story hooks

Think about SEO

Google has been the most significant traffic source for every customer I’ve ever helped. Yet, it has received far less attention than social media and newsletters. In my experience, Search tends to be an afterthought and even a topic left to technical experts. 

The surprising thing is that nearly all of us use Search all the time and far more than the superficially more attractive social networks. Everyone is now a search expert; you must channel this expertise into content decisions. 

A few examples: 

• Think about the search queries you would hope would take people to your blog post
• Use some of those queries to structure your post, including sub-headings
• Explore what sort of questions are being asked about your topic area

Further reading: The 5 Most Common Mistakes In Digital Content

2. The Broadcast Mindset

One trap organisations fall into is failing to frame their ideas with an audience in mind. The organisation’s structure is hierarchical, getting things done is complicated, and the path of least resistance is command and control. So, a brief comes down from the top, and there’s no chance to suggest a smart way of framing the idea so that it will appeal to an audience. 

However, content ideas must be framed to appeal to an audience to get maximum engagement. Posts that do this are often described as ‘relatable’. The simple notion is that you should avoid talking above the heads of your audience and instead think about what they are most interested in. Once you have their attention, you get a chance to say whatever else you want. However, you must put the audience’s interests at the heart of your post.

Framing is more than choosing an angle. It’s about putting yourself in the shoes of an audience member and thinking about what kind of emotional trigger is most likely to cut through their general indifference. Studies suggest that anger, surprise and positivity are particularly powerful. 

How to fix this

Write promotional copy before anything else

Try writing your headline, social copy, and google snippet first. This will force you to think about framing your idea for maximum appeal. What is the most relatable angle? What question is this post the answer to? If you’re finding this difficult, it may signal that the underlying story idea is not strong enough and that you should think again.

Two supplementary tactics have worked well with teams I support: 

1. Workshop story angles in a small group. Get team members to propose their story ideas alongside proposed promotional copy and encourage staff to find better, more relatable angles and language.
2. Use AI as a sounding board. I’ve never found an AI tool that can generate a usable headline, but they are good at suggesting approaches that get your creativity going. In addition to the big chatbots, it’s worth looking at Coschedule’s Headline Analyzer.

Answer All the Obvious Questions

There’s a pervasive online myth that ‘shorter is better’. I’ve heard this from content teams across media, corporate and purpose-driven sectors. It’s just not true. There is no golden rule for blog post length other than that posts need to be as long as they need to be. 

This is to say that if you want to produce an authoritative piece that answers an important question, it is likely that you will have to write at some length in reasonable detail to convince readers you know what you’re talking about and to answer the most obvious supplementary questions they have. 

Ignoring this by insisting on short posts leads to some very bad decision-making:

• Reader irritation at the failure to deliver on the promise of headlines or to answer obvious questions
• Risk of being perceived as superficial, lacking in quality and authority, and raising questions in readers’ minds about intent.

Evidence shows that, up to a point, greater length is associated with higher quality. And this is borne out by research.  The reverse can also be true—overlong, repetitive, and wordy posts are just as damaging to reputation and audience building. And if you’re seeking to answer a relatively straightforward question, keeping your post as short as possible will help the reader. 

Write down the questions your piece seeks to answer. You’ll have a principal question and then the follow-ups. But check that you’re not missing any frequently asked questions by typing your principal question into Google Search and look at the ‘people also asked’ box.

If there aren’t many questions to answer, keep it tight. If there are more than a few, write until you’ve covered them all.

Further reading: 3 Simple Ways to Boost Empathy in Your Content

Avoid over-formality

The problem is that most people have picked up bad habits from the education system. Essays tend to favour formal language, and their writers are expected to prove they understand all aspects of the topic. Both are diametrically opposed to the needs of busy readers. 

In the workplace, there is a tendency to conflate formality and jargon with professionalism. In many ways, the safest option is to write like your boss writes, and their boss. The net result is a default house style that makes internal sense but leaves readers out of the equation.

Online readers are a fussy lot. They abhor time-wasters, and if they sense that your post will be hard to follow or boring, or they pick up that you are primarily interested in showing how clever you are rather than answering their questions, you will likely lose them.

The trick is to be very clear about who you are writing for. In large organisations, it is very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that your real audience is your boss, or their boss. In many ways, it’s the safest option. But it’s why so much content can feel formal and technical and perhaps heavy on the jargon. 

To combat this, act like Steinbeck and think about someone you know who you want to share your story with. How would you pique their interest? What would you need to keep their attention? What questions might they ask? Once you start thinking this way, writing becomes much easier and more fun.

Further reading: Why Storytelling Matters and How to Make it Simpler

3. Desktop-centricity

I often make this mistake: I write and design on a desktop because it’s much easier than on a mobile. The larger screen and easy switching between tabs and apps encourage me to do complex things. And then I publish. Only later, when I’m looking at my mobile, do I realise my content looks clunky and unfriendly.

Even though I write about this problem and tell digital teams about it in my training sessions, it still happens to me. It’s extremely deep-seated. 

What are the top design fails on mobile websites? 

1. Lack of responsiveness: Nowadays, most websites are mobile responsive, which means they adjust from landscape to portrait orientation without too much trouble. But there’s a difference between being responsive and attractive. To check how your site looks on different screen sizes, try a free tool like Responsinator. 

2. Font is too small: If your first impression of content is that it’s like the small print on insurance contracts, you will likely click away. Users are intolerant of poorly designed sites, so make sure you look good at first sight.

3. Unbroken text: Mobile users are used to scrolling through social feeds, newsletter inboxes, and instant messaging apps. They have become conditioned to expect content that is easy to scan. Long paragraphs with few breaks and illustrations will look like hard work to them. So, break your text up with informative subheadings and useful images.

4. Graphic details are too small to view: If you create charts, graphs, or infographics, ensure they are simple enough to work in portrait or landscape view. Anything reasonably ambitious will require different graphics for desktop and mobile.

5. Using PDFs: If you expect mobile users to download PDFs, think again. There are steps you can take to optimise PDFs for mobile, but usability research shows they lead to frustrated users. Nielsen Norman recommends creating a web-friendly version of the content.

How to fix this

Some content producers do everything via mobiles. It is far less likely that such producers will create content that fails basic mobile accessibility standards. But it isn’t a guarantee that the piece as a whole will work well on mobile.

What’s required is a check, at the very least at the end of the production process for the following:

1. Do images work in the sense that they are comprehensible and any text is of an appropriate size?
2. Is the post laid out to encourage users to scroll on? The major issue here, and you must have experienced it, is a mobile user being confronted by a solid block of unbroken text that looks like it will be hard work to get through and sends a strong signal that the producers haven’t taken much trouble over the post.

The use of interesting images massively helps layouts that encourage scrolling. And there’s more about that in the next section. But several tactics that I’ve used throughout this post can make your work much more attractive to mobile users:

• Short paragraphs
• Bolded text 
• Bullet points and numbered lists
• Sub-headings

Further Reading: This is Why Your Content Isn’t Cutting Through: Scanning

Think visually

If you’ve found a topic and put in the research to turn it into a compelling blog post, you’ve already invested significant time and effort. So, it makes sense to consider whether there is more that you can do with what you have created. In particular, whether there is a highly visual format or formats that your material would support.

At this point, teams start making assumptions about how difficult visual content is to create. Many teams fall into the trap of thinking that without in-house designers and video editors, the results will lack impact and that using agency creators will be expensive. 

The tendency is not to do much.

This is a shame because effective layout and smart illustration keep users engaged. And there’s a lot you can do without high-end design skills: 

1. Visual assets need not be complex to succeed; in fact, the simpler, the better. 
2. You can achieve a lot using a set of templates from a designer.
3. Tools for designing more complex assets are getting easier and easier.
4. You don’t need to confine yourself to visual assets you’ve created.

How much visual content do you need?

I can’t recommend the Orbit Media survey highly enough. The granular detail of what top bloggers do to maximise engagement is invaluable.  Regarding visuals, bloggers who believe they get good performance use seven or more images.

The survey’s author, Andy Crestodina, draws a notably strong conclusion: social streams and top-performing blogs have much in common, and they contain “images at every scroll depth.” In other words, online readers are used to scrolling through easily scannable content streams, and your blog posts would do well to replicate this.

Final thoughts: This post as a worked example

An image at every scroll depth is a tall order, but it underlines the need to seize easy visual opportunities within your posts. This post is long and needed to be broken up to avoid appearing overwhelming. I will go through the process I used to do this (and I failed to meet the scroll depth standard).

I had an idea, wrote down some bullet points, did some research, produced a short draft, and paused. I went through the draft and noted the most obvious ‘visual opportunities’: 

• Three quotes turned into quote cards using the Runcible template (plus a tiny bit of PhotoShop styling for the author’s images).
• A factoid card on how blogging is getting harder using Canva.
• A recycled social video to make the point about attention spans.
• A table from Orbit Media’s blogging survey.

Use templates and embedding to take the hard work out of producing visuals

I’ve been influenced by news organisations and how they empower journalists to create simple graphic elements in their stories. I recommend getting professional help designing a set of templates.

My quote and factoid cards used Runcible templates and took little time to produce. The chart required more time and effort. I persevered because using data to make clear points hits the twin targets of efficient storytelling and visual appeal. 

Adding the video from YouTube was very simple. I used one of my own, but you can embed what you like. I took care with the chart from Orbit Media to link back to the original online and to give due credit in the caption, which is basic web etiquette. 

All in all, I produced six initial images for a post of about 3000 words. My point is that richly illustrating your posts needn’t be a big deal.

External promotion 

Then, I thought about how to promote the piece on social media. I could use any elements created for the post, but experience suggests something more editorially complete would be necessary. So, I created this infographic, which distils the piece into a single image:

This was by far the hardest thing of all to do. I can’t emphasise enough how thinking about visual formats forces you to simplify the underlying material. This piece started as ‘9 Blogging Traps’, but as soon as I drew up a table with ‘traps’, ‘causes’, and ‘solutions’, it became clear that lots of the traps had the same causes and solutions, so I narrowed them down to five. I also redrafted the text using this three-part structure, which has given it a better shape.

I’m worried it still looks overwhelming. And when I tried to create a simple animated video I found a way of simplifying the ideas even further, which goes to show how thinking visually can help you keep your text as simple as possible.

My central recommendation is that you don’t treat text and visuals and storytelling and promotion as separate things. Keeping these streams of thought together is challenging, particularly in larger organisations with a high degree of specialisation. I can only say that if you can get them working together, then everything becomes much more interesting for your teams and your readers and viewers.