Perception - A Blogger’s Secret Weapon
Wednesday, July 4th, 2007 at 8:00 am
Readers are the life blood of blogs, right? I know I’m not alone when saying that sometimes it seems like I have to resort to all sorts of weird and wonderful tactics to increase my blog traffic. Well, human beings are strange and complicated things and we bloggers can use this to our advantage…
Last time I checked, and that happens to be today, Technorati.com claimed to be tracking activity on 93.8 million blogs. They also say that 175 000 new blogs are created daily. This is obviously a dynamic figure influenced by many factors, but my point is that there are a lot of blogs out there, and yours is just one lonely star in the blogging galaxy.
Ok, so you’re not a wizard when it comes to writing (yet) and with that constantly growing amount of content floating along in cyberspace, it’s hard to imagine that someone is going to actually take the time to check what your blog is saying. Depressed yet? Well, chin up soldier because there is a secret weapon to grab readers and keep them coming back for more: “perception”. Here are 2 psychological techniques we can take advantage of:
- Confidence
In a paper on user-centered web design, Raïssa Katz-Haas and Aimée Truchard list “satisfaction” as one of ten usability guidelines:Make your site pleasant to use and view. Users’ satisfaction with the interface influences their
- Perception of ease-of-use.
- Motivation for learning how to use the site.
- Confidence in the reliability of the information in the site.
- The Halo-effect
According to an article on BBC News the brain makes decisions in just a 20th of a second of viewing a webpage.The researchers also believe that these quickly formed first impressions last because of what is known to psychologists as the “halo effect”. If people believe a website looks good, then this positive quality will spread to other areas, such as the website’s content.
Wow, that means you can trick users into thinking your blog is user-friendly, by having a pleasing design!
Let’s imagine a user comes across two blogs covering identical subject matter. Blog A has a confusing layout, illegible text, obscure links, distracting advertisements and no search. In addition to these problems, the content is poorly written with no line breaks or helpful sub-headings. Blog B has a clear layout, obvious navigation and links, scannable content and good search.
Blog B is preferable from the user’s point of view. It simply does not make life difficult and so it may have gained a loyal reader. Blog A, on the other hand, will surely not be bookmarked, subscribed to or re-visited. So you want to be Blogger B? Here are some guidelines:
- Take an objective look at your blog and put yourself in the user’s shoes. What would you change?
- Get some feedback on your design. Ask someone who regularly uses the internet what they think.
- Make sure your blog has a good search function. If there is no search function, the findability of content on your blog rests solely on good navigation.
- Make sure your navigation is clear and logical.
- Give your blog entries sensible logical titles – this affects the findability and the navigation!
- Be sure your text is legible – check out Blogsolid’s article on legibility.
- Don’t clutter your blog with ads, animations, senseless graphics and videos.
- Cut down on “fancy” design. It may look cool to you, but does it perhaps confuse users?
Don’t forget, blogging is about communication so make your message as accessible as possible. Grow your readership by removing stumbling blocks that get in the way of your message.
