The 5 Reasons Your Blog Isn’t Getting Page Views

The 5 Reasons Your Blog Isn’t Getting Page Views

No matter how much I write and share about strategies to use for building up your blog following, I am always confronted with readers who believe they are doing everything right and still wonder why they are not receiving much traffic to their blogs. Whenever I look into these cases, I tend to see many of the same issues over and over again that are keeping these bloggers from reaching their potential despite their best efforts. I know first hand how exhausting and demoralizing it can be to work very hard at something, thinking you are making all the right choices but are oblivious to the major errors you are facing that are holding you back. In this post I would like to share with you the 5 most popular reasons I find that blogs do not get page views.

#1. You don’t have a following yet online

This is a big one. If you are starting a blog, not seeing many page views, and don’t have a following online elsewhere, you can’t really expect much traffic until you are creating a fair amount of content on your blog to draw a crowd. I believe that it takes a few months of steady, high-quality content creation to gain a steady stream of page views via SEO (search engine optimization, the process by which you affect the visibility of your site’s content in search results). From there you really need to do more promotion yourself to get your blog’s name out there and I’ll talk more about that a little later on in this post!

#2. You’re not posting consistently

Like I said above, consistent posting for a significant period of time is necessary before you can expect to see results in the form of page views. This means defining the number of times you will post, the format and the types of topics you will post about and sticking to it! I know that consistency can be hard to establish in terms of your quality when you are first starting off blogging, and to some extent, I think it’s important to spend some time working on the craft of blogging so that you can develop your own style, but if you are looking for quicker results, you really need to do your research into other popular blogs to understand the level of quality that is expected in order to gain popularity. In order to gain significant page views, your blog will need to be consistent with the level of quality expected of popular blogs if you plan to be one of them!

#3. There is no cohesive theme to your blog posts

This is a common problem I see very frequently with people just starting out, but also with those who have been blogging for a significant period of time (about a year) but haven’t seen much of an upturn in page views. I can’t tell you the number of times I go to a blog and as I read through the posts, I ask myself, what is this blog about? Post topics are too general, and although they may be well written and have nice images accompanying the posts, their is so cohesion that helps me, as the reader, understand whether or not I want to read this blog consistently. To address this issue, I want you to create a quick elevator pitch for your content. If someone asked you what your blog is about, how would you respond in a few sentences? If your explanation includes terms like “variety”, “general”, “broad” or is defined as a documentation of your personal life, most likely the theme of your content is too vague for readers to develop a personal connection to it. I realize that you may think having variety in your posts will mean you will appeal to a broader audience, but that philosophy is actually the complete opposite of the one you should execute on when blogging. It’s better to be more specific, more specialized and as niche as you can be. Not so niche that you isolate yourself from most of the world, but then again, I bet you’d get more page views being incredibly niche than you would being incredibly general. To combat this, choose just a few topics for your blog posts but make sure they all roll up to a central unifying theme and stick to it. You may find that once you have the unifying theme that you can actually just tweak some of your old content to better fit the theme so that you aren’t wasting old content, but repurposing it to flow well with your new direction.

#4. You’re not using great images

If you aren’t using images in your blog posts, you are missing a significant source of SEO. Not only do images add interest to your blog posts, but they are also the quickest way to form a connection between your content and your reader. Using great images to help illustrate your content will add to the richness of your reader experience. Make sure to use images at the start of your blog posts, and throughout long posts to break up long walls of text. Make sure your images are large enough to fill the width of your blog post and whenever possible use real images and photographs as opposed to text graphics or illustrations. Most of all, make sure you have the right to use all images you post on your site or else you are in danger of a copyright violation. The way I prevent copyright violations on my blog is to always use my own images. I take nearly 100% of the images I use in my posts with very few exceptions coming from fair use images. If you would like to learn more about how I take my own images and start developing your own photography for your website or blog, click here to learn more about Styled Stock Photography!

#5. You’re not promoting your content

This is another common issue and it’s important to remedy this, especially if you don’t already have much of a following online because the good content that you create on your blog is the best selling point to get you loads of new followers on social media! When it comes to promoting you content, I find that the best thing to do is to identify one two two social media platforms that you enjoy and find yourself spending a lot of time on. No matter what the platform is, it can be leveraged to help you promote your content and gain a following. Once you have decided on the platforms you want to use, I suggest finding out everything about how they operate and what great content on that platform looks like. In my Empire Building Communication Workbook, I cover the major social platforms (including blogs) and share the secrets and strategies to mastering each. Once you understand what content does well on those platforms, you should create similar content related to your blog posts. Yes, you will need to develop a consistent schedule with this platform as well, but if you understand what does well and mimic it with your account, your content will shine and you will gain new followers and traffic to your blog.

I hope this post has been helpful to you if you have been struggling to identify why your own blog isn’t gaining traction on page views. Leave a comment down below with which issue you believe you have a problem with and we can brainstorm some additional strategies to help you work past this hump in no time!

xoxo,