Elanso

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If you’ve been wondering why your blog or website hasn’t been growing as quickly or steadily as you hoped, you might be encountering one (or more) of the five barriers to success. So far, I’ve covered three parts:

1. Content with a lack of significance for its target audience.
2. A lack of diverse entry points to the site.
3. An un-defined or vaguely defined target audience.

In this post, I’ll be outlining the fourth barrier to success: visitors perceiving your site as low quality, even when it isn’t.

Barrier 4: Perception is Everything

In ‘Why Traffic, Your Subscriber Count and Money Don’t Matter,’ I talked about how the way visitors perceive your blog or website can often influence its reality. A blog that looks and feels unread and unremarkable will often become one. A website that looks slick and popular will often go on to become well-known, even if it’s not highly trafficked in the beginning.

You can expect new visitors to your blog or website to judge it on all the following criteria:

• Design — does it look professional or sloppy, clean or cluttered? Most (but certainly not all) quality sites have been carefully designed and well-presented. On a first-impressions basis, visitors often make judgments based on what is ‘generally’ true.
• Content — is it gripping? Is it relevant? Is it original?
• Subscriber count — is it small or big? How many other people are engaged followers?
• Comment count — for new visitors, a high comment count seems to indicate an engaged, passionate readership. A low comment count can make the content seem unremarkable, not worth talking about. Speaking for myself only, when I’m trying to work out at a glance whether a blog is established or not, this is usually the first place I look (even though I know it doesn’t tell the whole story, a visitor doesn’t have much else to go on).
• Quality of writing — sloppy writing which hasn’t been polished or proofed can make great ideas seem like mediocre ones.
• Usability — most well-loved websites and blogs make all the information a visitor could need easily available. If visitors feel lost, they might wander somewhere else.
• Confusion — many blogs suffer from a lack of clarity in the way they present elements. Separate bits of information, links and navigational elements are jumbled together, look messy and are hard to separate. Visitors won’t enjoy interacting with a system like this.

While you have access to email, stats, subscriber numbers, Technorati rankings and monthly earnings figures, your visitors don’t. Your blog or website tells two different stories: one story to you, and one story to your visitors. Visitors are much more likely to give a blog that seems high-quality more chances to impress them. They’ll dig deeper into your articles and spend more time examining what your site has to offer.

You should try to establish these 3 indicators of popularity and quality on your site.

1. At least five comments on each post you write. If you don’t have a large pool of potential commenters, respond to every commenter and get to know your most regular commenters. All you need is five people who comment on every post you write, or ten people who comment on every second post. You could even work out an arrangement: they comment on every post you write, you comment on every post they write. By commenting on five blogs, you can make your own blog look popular and established.
2. Only show your subscriber count if it tells the right story. If your comment average is around 1 per post but you have several hundred subscribers, it’s worth showing your count. If you get a lot of comments (10+ average) but have less than a thousand subscribers, I’d suggest not showing your count. In other words, if your comment count makes you look more popular than other blogs in your niche which have more subscribers than you, don’t show your subscriber count. Let visitors assume that it’s a lot higher than it is.
3. List your most popular posts. Once your site has been running for a while you’ll have a pool of articles you can use as source material for a list of your ‘Most Popular’ articles. You can call the list something else, as long as it highlights your most popular content. The question you should ask when making this list: which five to ten posts would I want every new visitor to see?

If your blog or website looks and feels like it’s established and well-loved, visitors will assume it is, even if the stats below the surface tell a different story.

The fourth barrier to success is the counter-point: if your blog or website looks and feels un-established and unremarkable, visitors will often assume it is. The stats below the surface will usually end up reflecting that reality, unless some radical changes are made.