Reasons Why Your Content Might Be Failing You?

By Dino Adamou

 Every content creator and blogger knows the feeling: you spend all night working on a great article or post and no one ever comes to read it. The days go by and no comments appear and the hit tracker just sits at zero, mocking you. Why did your stunning piece of content end up in the bin?

There is no simple answer to this question. Content, even quality content, can go unnoticed for a lot of reasons. However, there are some common failures that many content creators fall prey to, so let’s look at them and see what we can do about them.

Good Content Needs To Actually Be Good

You’ve been writing on computer repair for months and no one visits your blog? Maybe you don’t know as much about computer repair as you thought. Have an expert in your field look over your blog and make sure that it sounds like someone who knows what they are talking about. Maybe you do have great knowledge; you just are not very good at communicating it. Do some research and learn how to make your writing more powerful, or better yet, just hire someone to write it for you.

Good Content has Great Legs

If you want to spread your message, you need to have content that people are going to find interesting, so interesting that they want to share it with their friends. This is how content goes viral, by being compelling, interesting, shocking, gripping or funny enough that when you read it you want other people to read it. It’s very hard to create viral content from the ground up because in our own minds everything we create is awesome. The best you can do is write to the best of your abilities and provide link sharing buttons and widgets around your content to try and encourage people who might be on the fence.

Good Content is Authoritative

Google loves content that speaks with authority. Readers respect articles that provide useful, actionable advice. This means that you can’t just throw stuff together and hope for the best. You need to do research, cite sources and quote experts wherever possible (without making the article sound too scholarly). Look at articles from “real” magazines and newspapers. Do they sound like someone rambling about their favorite subject? No, they are backed up with expert insight and references. Even if you ARE the expert, having references that compare and contrast to your writing is important.

Good Content is Promoted

As much as we love having our content found “organically” through search engine queries and by having users share the content with each other, it is naive to think that all we have to do is “write it and they will come.” When you put up a new article or blog post, go out and promote it! Tweet about it, share it on your own Facebook page, etc. The first person who should be cheerleading for your new content is YOU, so go do it!

Content is what makes or breaks a website. Informative, useful information is what Google and readers are looking for, so if you want to succeed that’s exactly what you have to provide. 

What are some of your content strategies that you employ on your own sites?