5 Simple Tips to Make Lazy Readers Stay on Your Blog – 30 Days to Awesomize Your Blog

I have to start today’s post with a brilliant quote that Jenika McDavitt of Psychology for Photographers shared from Seth Godin in her “From Portfolio to Profit Engine” book.

“The minute it’s not easy, lazy people will flee. And everyone is lazy sometimes.” – Seth Godin <<Tweet it!>>

Load up your blog. We need to look at some things, because we have to help the lazy people out. You want them to stay, you don’t want them to flee, right?

• How fast does your website load? – People aren’t just lazy, they have no patience as well. You need your blog to load fast. Look at the graphics you have on your page – are you uploading high resolution images to your blog and then requiring it to resize them small? Do you have 40 buttons in the sidebar that are all loading from different sources (besides your server)? Does every blog post have 20 images, and the home page of your blog has 10 posts on it? You get the point – those images are slowing you down. Make them smaller and web-friendly and make your blog faster. Consider only loading 5 posts on your site, not 10. Speed it up!
• Where do you want me to go? – Look at the navigation on your site. First of all, can you find it? Is there a menu bar on the top, or a menu on the sidebar? How do you go from post to post? How do you learn more about you? Can you find your pricing? How about to contact you? Whatever you want people to do next when they come to your site – make that thing EASY to find.
• Can you read the fonts? – If I was on a 27″ monitor, would the fonts on your site be teeny-tiny small? How is the contrast to read? I know you love that super light blue font on a white background, and it matches your branding – but if you can’t read it, what good is it doing? (Believe it or not, people with visual impairments do read the internet!) Help people out. Bump up the contrast.
• Scroll, scroll, scroll… – How long do you have to scroll just to find the very first blog post? Do you lose patience with all the scrolling?
• Can you get more of this goodness? – Ok, they came, they saw, they want MORE. Yay! Is there a way that you can easily sign up for your email list? How hard is that to find? Do you send out emails with every new blog post? Once a month? Once a whenever-you-get-around-to-it?

Hopefully these quick little fixes will help you out when your readers have the lazies. They more you make it easy for them, the longer they will stick around!

Want to more about the psychology of building a website, and how to write better copy? Be sure to grab a copy of Jenika’s books! From Portfolio to Profit Engine: How to Build an Absolutely Irresistible Photography Website or Irresistible Words. Want them both? Pick up the bundle package!

Thank you for visiting the 30 Days to Awesomize Your Blog series! It is free to follow along here online, and you can sign up for the newsletter in my sidebar to be notified via email of the posts. You can also follow along the #30DAB hashtag on social media to learn more!

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