Your Blog Sucks! – Top 5 Ways To Help Fix Your Blog

Let’s be honest for a second, “Your Blog Sucks!!”

Harsh I know, but it’s an important point for you to realise if you intend to make a success of your website. Ask any successful blogger and they will tell you that at sometime or another their own blog sucked! None of us start out with an amazing, absolutely perfect site where we get everything right first time, every time. We all have to learn the hard way and make mistakes along the way. In fact ask any successful entrepreneur or business owner and they will say the same thing about their businesses, that they had to learn from the mistakes that they made along the way to get them where they are today.

Even as I am writing this, I know that there are plenty of things that I need to work on to improve this very site because I know that my site is not perfect and it never will be. I need to constantly improve and develop this site to keep you readers returning for more.

So it’s fine to say that your blog sucks. In fact it’s a positive thing to acknowledge that your website sucks because it means that you realise that you have things to improve on.

So lets look at some of the most common reasons why a blog sucks and ways in which to fix them.

1. You Use A Rubbish Website Design

The layout of your website is very important. This is how you display your content to your site visitors. Now, the problem may be that people find it difficult to navigate around your site, or that you use the exact same layout as hundreds of other sites. People remember your site based on it’s appearance, you may write the best articles on the internet, but if they are displayed poorly or worse that they can’t find them due to poor website design, then they won’t stick around for long.

First and foremost, you need to make sure that the design you use for your website makes it really easy for people to navigate around your site and find what they are after. This may just require you to place a few more links around your site or change the way you display your content.

Secondly, I’d discourage you from using a website theme that is used by lots of other websites. Imagine you go to a book shop or video store and all the books and DVD’s had the same front cover. It would be difficult to distinguish between them and find what you were looking for. Well using the same website theme as other sites can be similar to this. If anything, people may just forget which site they read your content on.

Make sure you use a unique theme for your blog. You could choose to invest in a custom made theme specifically for your site from a web designer. Alternatively, you could just spend some time customizing the theme that you have, perhaps making sure that you have a unique logo and changing all the background colours. This option is much cheaper and probably a much better decision if you are just starting out. For some high quality website themes to use, make sure you check out these sources; WooThemes, Daily WP.

2. You Make It Difficult For Visitors To Interact With You

This is a very common mistake by new bloggers. When visitors navigate to your website, they find it hard to get in touch with you, whether it’s because you don’t have a contact page, social media accounts, RSS feed, a subscribe button, etc. or whether they are just hard to find!

Thankfully this is a pretty easy problem to fix. You just need to make sure that you position all these things (contact page, social media account links, RSS feed, a subscribe button, etc.) where visitors can see them. Either position them in your website header at the top of the page, in your sidebar, in your website footer or actually before/after your blog posts. I find that using a combination of these works best because you know that they won’t miss them.

3. You Don’t Have Anything For Your Readers To Subscribe To

It’s one thing if people can’t find where to subscribe, but not having anything for readers to subscribe to is a big mistake! You are really missing out if you are not offering a free newsletter or eCourse for people to sign up to because this is a great way to encourage people to come back and revisit your website. The more people you have subscribed to your site, the more people you an get back to your site and read your latest content, buy products, click on adverts, etc.

I’d highly recommend that you sign-up to AWeber, the email marketing program that all the professionals use (including me). This helps to manage your email list of subscribers and sends out automatic emails to your followers. Check out our other articles to learn more;

• ‘AWeber Review – How to Pick the Right Email Auto-Responder?‘
• ‘Use Email Marketing to Increase Traffic with Return Visitors!‘

4. You Don’t Interact With Your Reader’s

How can you expect to grow a website and get lots of people visiting and talking about it if you don’t interact with them. You may as well just stand on a box in your local town center and shout at people, but ignore the ones that talk back to you. Blogging is a two way thing, you need to interact with them just as much as you need them to interact with you.

Make sure you answer people’s questions, reply to comments, be helpful, answer Tweets, etc. If someone asks for additional help on a subject that you have covered, try to help them out. Most likely they won’t be the only one who has this problem.

If people see that you are helpful, they are more likely to keep coming back to your website. If they see you as unhelpful, then they will just go elsewhere. It’s as simple as that!

5. Leaving A Comment On Your Blog Is A Nightmare

The whole point of comments is to help build a community around your website. If people find it difficult or the whole process to long, then they won’t bother. Comments are a great way to get feedback from your readers and see how your writing is being noticed.

The easy way to fix this would be to switch to another commenting system. Try something like ‘Disqus‘ or the ‘Facebook commenting system‘. These make leaving a comment much easier for people, which ultimately encourages them to leave more comments.

Why not leave a comment below and see how easy it is! Do you have any other suggestions to help people with their website?