Why is Your Blog Audience Declining?

Running a successful blog is a real labour of love.

It’s hard work, never ending, but can be very rewarding.

But what happens when your analytics show that your audience is in decline?

Rather than scream, hide in the nearest cupboard or burst into tears, it’s time to get proactive and do something about it.

The following are some of the tell tale signs that show your audience is falling and what you can do to counter it.

1. Pages per visit

This is one of the figures that will be shown by your analytics.

Ideally, you want people that come to your blog to read one post and then follow a link to read another one. But if your figures are showing that people are only visiting one or two pages (or at least the number of viewed pages has been declining over 6 months or so), that’s a sure sign that your blog is losing its appeal.

Now would be the time to take a look at what you’re been writing and reviewing it. A good tool to use for this is Social Crawlytics, a free tool that helps you analyse how popular or unpopular your content is (or your competitor’s). It provides a detailed report to show where content is shared and how often.

Find out what is working best and give your audience more of the same.

2. Average time of visit

How long are your visitors staying on your blog?

This one is closely related to number 1. If they are arriving and then leaving again almost immediately, it’s a sure sign that your content isn’t engaging them. It may also be because they don’t find it relevant to them.

Again, it’s time to review your content and start putting out more of what does work.

3. Increasing traffic

Increased traffic is what you want, but not if you’re not doing anything to get it.

‘Free’ traffic like this can lead to complacency. It’s very easy to sit back and take it easy thinking you don’t have to do anything about promotion as people are coming of their own accord.

The problem is this is likely to be short lived, so what happens when it stops? You can’t afford to stop promoting your blog.

4. One source of traffic

This is bad news, just as if your business relied on one main customer.

For example, if you rely solely on Google traffic, what happens if you’re badly affected by the next algorithm change?

Make sure you put just as much effort into your newsletter, social media, video and website promotion to bring traffic in from all over the place.

5. Dedication

As we mentioned earlier, running a successful blog takes a lot of dedication.

If you start getting complacent or can find any number of other things to do when you should be blogging, think about the bigger picture.

What will all those readers do without your words of wisdom? They rely on your content so don’t let them down.

6. Getting stale

If you’re finding it difficult to constantly generate new ideas, (let’s face it if you’ve been running your blog for several years it’s going to get harder), perhaps it’s time to diversify a bit and bring a new topic into your blog’s remit.

This will not only breathe life into your blog, it may also open your writing up to a whole new audience.

Keeping a long-running blog fresh is difficult, but hopefully the above has given you a few ideas about how you can inject new life into it.