This is a pretty interesting tidbit I found over on Chris Garrett’s blog and you can read the PDF from Ad Age and Vizu Answers to get the full details.

It may not surprise you to read that visitors want good writing from a blog. Frankly, most people won’t read anything that isn’t at least decent writing. Why should they?

Readers also want a good topical focus. This is something for you to consider if you’re running a general blog. You may do better to break it up into a few topics. It might help to increase your overall readership.

Visual design actually ranks pretty low as a factor for assessing your credibility or getting regular readers. Something to think about as you fuss about the appearance of your blogs.

But for those of you who are always trying to optimize your blogs for the search engines, you will also want to consider how most people find the blogs they read. It’s not the search engines. 67.3% find blogs through links on other blogs. 22.9% find blogs through recommendations. Only 19.6% find blogs by using search engines.

Of course, getting a good readership started is still tough. You can write well and be really focused, but building a readership takes a lot of effort. Participate in other blogs, link to them appropriately and over times things may improve for your own blog.

Technorati Tags: , , ,