Attracting an audience and readers to your blog, website or your social media profile is more about retaining viewers than actually gaining new ones. Keeping the readers you already have is more effective than trying to get new people to read what you have written. If you write with your own style and voice, you will find that you gain a loyal readership and are also more likely to attract new people to your writing.
It’s about being memorable.
Here are some insights into how to attract more traffic to your blog by being distinctive with your writing.
1. A distinctive style may get you more repeat visitors
If you have a distinctive writing style that makes it easy to spot your writing compared to other peoples writing, then you are one-step closer to having more visitors and repeat visitors. Again, it is repeat visitors that matter. If you get enough regular traffic then at least a small part of your publicity budget may be cancelled because your regular viewers are spreading the good word about your writing.
2. Repeat visitors may write about you or tell others
It does not seem obvious or likely, but the fact is that regular viewers will write about your services and your writing on other websites and social media. Regular viewers will most likely write good things, and some new viewers may write bad things.
The point is that a distinctive style and working on developing some great writing attributes gets you more repeat viewers, and it is those people that write positive things about your writing. Those are the ones that spread the good word and help you get more visitors with what is essentially free advertising and publicity.
Reward your loyal and repeat viewers by giving them what they signed up for. It means not selling out by advising the products of other people with your posts, and it means not recommending things that you claim to like. If people keep visiting because they like your distinctive writing style, then keep giving them your style. Put your loyal viewers first because they are the true lifeblood of your blog, website or social media profile.
3. Repeat and loyal visitors will defend you
This happens when you gain a following and people start to visit your content on a regular basis. They become emotionally invested in what you write and the content you produce. They will start to defend you because of that, and you gain this repeat readership by having your own writing style and voice.
4. Repeat visitors are the lifeblood of any website or blog
The new visitors are not what power a business, website or blog; it is the people that come back again. They are the ones that make up the traffic numbers, which means you should concentrate less on getting new readers and concentrate more on keeping the ones that visit.
Your own style helps to keep people coming back because it separates you from all the other websites and blogs they have read.
5. Your own style makes you distinctive and memorable
Distinctive is memorable in most cases, and you can control if you are memorable for a good reason or a bad reason. Being distinctive will get more people to visit your content, and it also gives people a reason to recommend your content to others. It gives them something to focus on when they are recommending you to other people.
6. Generic and pop-centered content works
This is the point that few people understand, and it is that popular and generic text will attract more viewers than distinctive text and a great writing style, but fewer people will return the week after. Writing generic and pop-centered content is okay, but it is not going to keep people coming back the same way that writing with your own style will.
In the end, you have to work harder if you are pumping out generic content to please the masses, and there is more competition if you do not create your own style.
7. It is more fun to write with your own style
Adding your own flavor to your text and styling your writing your own way is more fun. It allows you to express yourself a little easier and you will often find that the content flows from you a lot more freely. Maybe it is because when you write in your own tailored style you are writing the way you think and talk, or maybe it is just because writing in your own style is simply easier and therefore more fun.
8. It’s not all about the social media response
The success of your new writing style should not be judged by your social media response. You may get no response at all, or you may get a bad response. Both of these circumstances may lead you to think that your style needs changing, but your social media response is not the key indicator in this area.
How much traffic you gain and how much you retain is a clear indicator of how successful your new writing style is. It will also take a few weeks for the results to become clear, as there are always anomalies when it comes to traffic tracking.
9. Commenters aren’t everything
If you get three thousand hits per week, do you get three thousand comments? Not in this life you don’t, what you get is a batch of comments from what amounts to 3-5% of you actual audience. Yet, when writers see their comments, they often react to them. They see that commenters have said things and they adapt their writing and their style according to the comments.
What they fail to realize is that the commenters do not speak for the silent majority–they speak for the outspoken minority. The comments you receive should not be used to judge the success of your writing style. Your traffic numbers and repeat traffic numbers are what you should use to measure your success.
10. Unimaginative is often tied with formulaic writing
Formulaic writing is not writing with style. It is the same generic tripe that was mentioned earlier in this article, and even though it can win you some traffic it will not keep them coming back every week, a distinctive writing style will keep them coming back.