Does your Blog Make People want to come back?
It’s estimated that there are over 200 million blogs floating around on the internet. Do you ever wonder how yours stands up to the rest?
There’s a lot involved in automotive blog marketing. Just getting content up and making sure it’s optimized for search engine traffic is hard enough. But how your blog looks and feels is just as important in making sure your readers come back after their first visit.
Do you allow for comments?
One of the key differences between a blog and a static website is that blogs allow your readers the chance to contribute to the conversation. Many people love reading blogs because they’re not an authoritarian media -- it’s not just you writing and them reading. But many blog owners turn off the comment capacity on their blogs, often fearing spam.
Always allow for comments, even when nobody’s reading your blog yet. Give people the chance to contribute. They may join in and they may not, but they certainly won’t if you don’t let them.
Do you have a contact form?
Even if users can comment, some will prefer to get in touch with you privately. Is your contact form or email information easy to find and use? Do you require too much information from users when they’re filling out the form or can they simply leave their email address? Making yourself easy to find is crucial in this interconnected world.
Can your readers navigate by category and by date?
When a new visitor likes what they see, the odds are pretty good that they’ll want to see more. Depending on what they’re looking for they’ll want to navigate in different ways. If you’re discussing local events or issues that are time sensitive, it makes sense to navigate by date and you’ll want to have your archives searchable by month of publication. If they’re particularly interested in a certain topic -- trucks, for example, or maintenance issues -- they don’t want to have to search through every post you’ve ever written to find relevant posts. It makes sense in that case to allow them to search by category.
Is it easy on the eyes?
In many cases, blogs that look great the first time you look at them on the designer’s mockup don’t look great with lines and lines of text. The human eye can only handle so much information at once, so make sure your text is broken up with lots of white space. And speaking of white space -- it’s supposed to be white, or at least very white. Light text on a dark backround is hard to read for an extended period, and readers will click away instead of squinting.
Luckily, most of these issues require only a few clicks to change so if you need to make some fixes, it shouldn’t take too long. With a few simple tweaks to your automotive brand marketing strategy you can end up with readers staying longer -- and coming back for more.
