Only 3.75% of online time is spent consuming news and information (the category into which blogs fall) – which compares to an average of just 6 and a half minutes a day.
Does Engaged Reading Time Matter?
Yes, it does.
The Chartbeat study was skilled to quantify this finding: “Visitors who read an article for 3 minutes returned twice as often as those who read for one minute.”
Chatbeat organized a test amongst 1,500 paid candidates who were each given an article to read on a screen for a set time – ranging from 5 to 20 seconds – which presented an ad in the right-hand challenge. Candidates were asked to read the article, and were told that they would be asked questions about its content afterwards. The only variable was the amount of time that people were given to study the article before the screen remove empty.
The result? “candidates who study for 15 or more seconds were 25% more likely to recall the brand than those who read for 10 or fewer seconds.”
How to Boost Average Reading Time on Your Blog
Targeting
if we need people to consume more time reading on our blog, then we need to be targeting the right people. With developing the right inbound marketing personas.
What are inbound marketing personas?
The detailed profiles of semi-fictionalized representations of our ideal customer (or, in this case, reader).
The first thing we should conduct market research, by all means – and according to the research we have to create our blog content.
Placing the Right Content in Forepart of the Right People
Once we have recognized the most engaging topics to write about, the next stage will be to recall the exact people that we need to read it, and do everything we can to make sure they find this content.
2 methods we can use to find our target people
By using social media
Consult our inbound marketing personas once more. Scrutinise the profiles, and match them up to members of our social media audience. Some people will be on LinkedIn, some on Twitter, and but more maybe over at Google+. These are correct people who are most likely to need to spend a few minutes reading your carefully created content – so track them across social media, work out what times of day they are most active, and share our post at correlating moments, that will increase the chances of clicks.
Another option is to target some of our identified leads directly through email marketing. Or we could perhaps even send these people a direct message containing a link to the article. Although we do it, one of the most main aspects of improving engaged reading time is to ensure that we target those who are most likely to be engaged with the content in the first place.
Include Estimated Reading Times
This is a significant little trick that has gained popularity over recent years.
If at the head of the page, you tell visitors how many minutes it will take them to learn your blog post, the evidence recommends that they’ll be more likely to read it.
For example:
By adding estimated reading times to our articles in our website, the overall time spent on his site improved by 13.8%.
Brian Cray(front end engineer ), tells “What’s more interesting though,” he wrote, “people either noted me, subscribed to my blog or retweeted my articles 66.7% more often.”
David Michael Ross (Web developer) also experimented with the technique, and he too enjoyed favourable results, with his bounce rate dropping by 13%.
The average adult, according to the article, reads at a rate of between 200 and 250 words a minute, which leads to a enagaging easy calculation:
Word count / 225 = No of minutes it takes to read an article
For the aim of good form and neatness, we would recommend rounding the resulting figure up or down to the nearby minute (i.e. 4.876 minutes, round up to 5 minutes, and so on).
Though, there is an online tool that can do the calculation for you – Read-O-Meter. Just copy and paste your text into the offered field, hit the button, and get your calculation.
Traffic Driving ideas for B2B Blog
Storytelling
We are already producing great content, but how can we upgrade things further? How can we make content that is so good that people can’t help but tell the word about it?
This does mean supporting more time into creating blog posts but the advantages of doing so are stunning.
And it’s these types of “pillar” posts that shape the foundations for a more blogs.
Why?
Aside from more engagement, they also create more traffic and earned links offering you put the time into promoting them effectively.
There are many ways we can approach these pillar type posts:
- Enclose a topic in more detail than other posts on the web
- Use of unique imagery
- Create a unique design/layout for the post
- Include a table of contents to improve navigation
- Include a level of interactivity such as filtering options for list posts
Captivating Title
As a marketer, the first step in making the transition from glossed over to read and engaged is a killer title.so we can forgo the “How to” titles and focus on what’s working now:
- Stats and Figures
- Questions
- Buzzwords
Images and Sub-headers
People don’t learn blogs like they execute books or even newspapers. They manage to scan or scroll down a page, rather than reading each word.
However, what we’re tough to do here is simulate people to actually stop on our pages and read what we’ve got to say. And to perform that, we need to halt them in their tracks when scanning – which means including lot of images and sub-headers.
Sub-headers must be just declaring enough to create people want to pause and read the paragraph beneath, and images thrilling enough as to fill a sense of intrigue into the words that surround them. The idea is to make a blog post that is visually created in a way that makes people want to stop and find out more about what’s being said.
Offer your readers
The most powerful solution is to provide a free download in exchange for joining your email list.
By doing this we will be capable to send updates on our new content to people who may not have subscribed otherwise.
Ask questions
We could ask questions in the emails we send to our subscribers or we could ask questions at the end of blog posts.
Where and when we choose to ask questions depends entirely on what your goal is with your content.
For example, on some posts we may prefer to not ask a question and encourage your readers to take action on a particular piece of advice instead.
Offers Tips & Takeaways
To create it simple for readers to view value in your content and maintain them on the page, consider the following:
- Use quotes or call outs.
- Highlight specific tips
- Resources or Link Lists
Resource and list posts are perfect if we are just learning about a category.
Always consider adding our own blog or resource to any “best-of” list. Many times when we share a list of tips from experts, it will promote our post for you.
Case Study Post
A case study stares at a project, process, and the result in more of a story-driven format. Aim using it to focus the success of your product or service. Example: SEO Case Studies
Problem/Solution Post
- Know a problem in your post’s title, headline, and introduction.
- Later apply the rest of the post to present the solution to that problem.
Engaged reading time is an extremely usable metric to track – and further, according to a survey from Eloqua says, only 27% of marketers are doing so. So, start targeting more vigorously, ensure that we are including plenty of engaging images, breaking our text up with sub-headers, and including estimated reading times at the tops of posts.
If you pledge time to creating with those blogging tips, you will be on your way to success!
