5 Reasons People Don’t Read Your Content (The Harsh Truth)
You sit there in front of your computer and create the best piece of content you think you have ever created.
Maybe it’s a Youtube video you have been working on for weeks or maybe it is an long informative 2000 words blog post.
You feel really confident about it. So you hit that PUBLISH button.
A few minutes pass by — No engagement.
A few hours pass by — No engagement
A day passes by — 2 comments.
The post didn’t perform as well as you expected it to. What went wrong here? What are the possible reasons people are not paying attention to your content? Is it the quality? Does it have to do anything with timing?
Here are 5 Reasons People Are Not Paying Attention To What You Have To Say—
1. Your Content Is Boring.
This might be hard to accept. Maybe you are just doing what everyone else is doing in your niche. You haven’t differentiated yourself from your competitors and there is nothing unique about your content.
If everyone else is posting Instagram photos with motivational quotes doesn’t mean you need to do the same.
The old adage says- It’s good to have competition, because it shows there is money to be made in that niche.
But what they don’t tell you is — To compete in an over-saturated niche, you have to innovate and make yourself stand out and not sound like everyone else.
If you are not being unique and remarkable, don’t have a story to tell — why should people bother to pay attention to you?
2. Not Understanding What Your Audience Wants.
Gary Vaynerchuk is one of the most influential marketers of our time. He understands where people’s attention is going next.
He understands his audience deeply and creates content based on what people engage most with.
For Example — Creating less than a minute videos is getting the most engagement on Facebook these days.
To understand what you audience really wants, you have to test various forms of content and check what performs better. Use analytics and data to track what people like and what they don’t like.
Does your audience like content in video form? Or they like to read 500 word blog posts? Do they like you posting quotes on Instagram? Or do they like to see you document your daily life on Snapchat? Figure what your audience wants and give it to them.
3. Not Being Consistent.
This is one of the biggest reason why people fail at building an audience online.
Two weeks in, they expect to amass a huge audience of 10,000 daily visitors on their blog. They expect their “ 7 Secrets To Making A Million Dollars This Year” post to go viral.
Reality is harsh though. It doesn’t happen overnight.
There is virtue in being patient.
Being consistent with your content is the key to building a good relationship with your target audience and providing them value every step of the way is what deepens that relationship. It takes time to cultivate an audience online.
Remember: Rome wasn’t built in a day.
4. Not Providing Enough Value.
Ask yourself: Does this content really add value to people’s lives? Or am I just doing it for the sake of making content?
Most of the time, your content isn’t valuable enough. People want something that can improve their life. They want better products and services that makes their life easier, not hard. Content works the same way.
Best performing content is the one that provides massive value without asking anything in return.
Example of Best Performing Content Would Be From Neil Patel’s Blog:
His content is long and informative and is something people find entertaining yet actionable at the same time.
These are the keys to writing great content.
If people feel they are being sold something , they will withdraw. People like to buy, but they don’t like to be sold.
Write content only for the purposes of educating your target audience and nurture a good relationship with them.
5. You Don’t Engage With Your Audience.
Engagement is one of the biggest metric for ranking in Google. If people are actively engaging on your blog or even on your Youtube videos, your video will rank higher in search engines.
But most people take this factor lightly. They let those comments on their blog post sit for months. They never take the time to reply back to those comments, they never reply to discussion happening on twitter and that causes their audience to lose interest.
You have to actively engage with your audience on every social media channel you are active on, whether it is replying to a tweet somebody mentioned you in, or it is the first comment on your Facebook post.
Engage with your audience and develop a lifelong relationship with them.
Now let me ask you, how many of these mistakes are you committing? Let me know in the comments below :)
