The 5 Barriers to Success Series — Part 1: Lack of Significance

Photo by Frabuleuse

Each weekend for the next five weeks I’ll be posting about one of the 5 barriers to success. If your blog is growing too slowly, if you’re rarely receiving comments or blogging feels like shouting into an empty valley, I hope this series will help you identify what isn’t working — and change it for the better.

Barrier 1: Lack of Significance

For readers to link, comment or vote for your content it needs to invoke a strong reaction in readers — in other words, it needs to be significant to them.

You can be significant while being short (just look at Lifehacker). Even if you’re just sharing a link, it will be significant if it’s truly useful to your readers. If it’s not very useful, if you’re not adding value, or if they’ve seen it before, you’re running the risk of creating insignificant content.

Creating long articles doesn’t necessarily guarantee significance. It can be easy to pad out one good point with lots of insignificant ones, or to take too long expressing yourself (to the point where readers lose patience).

Other bloggers create content with hidden value. It could be truly useful, but if the headline or introduction meanders, your readers won’t know. New visitors will rarely stick with a long post unless they’re crystal clear on what they stand to gain for their time.

Some signs your content needs to be more significant to your target audience:

• You get a decent amount of traffic, but your subscriber count increases very slowly.
• Your visitors aren’t often moved to comment.
• Your traffic is reasonable, but you receive very few inbound links.
• Your content is rarely submitted to StumbleUpon.

If your blog displays any of these symptoms, I’d suggest revising your content strategy to aim for significance in every post you write. Ask yourself: “Will my readers care about this?”