Clarity Wins

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How One Blogger Grew His Traffic 10x Without Creating New Content

If you’ve been blogging for a year or more, your blog is probably a mess. There are likely broken links, old images, junky content, etc. We’re not trying to start a beef, those things just happen.

Here’s the unfortunate truth: that messiness is actually holding your blog back from its true traffic potential. For real. Just ask Todd Tresidder. He recently completely redesigned his blog, got rid of the outdated stuff, and made it a better user experience. It was a huge job, but after it was completed he saw a 10x growth in blog traffic — without creating one new post.

We’ll repeat that: a 10x traffic growth without creating any new content.

Hear how he did it in the latest Problogger podcast. No time to listen? We’ve got the show notes and time stamps right here…

• (02:01) Todd is a financial planning blogger who started his website back in 1998.
• (04:05) He knew that over the years his website had become so jumbled with content that it wasn’t providing a clear user experience. Broken links were abundant, images looked old, the voice was all over the place.
• (05:00) These issues happen to all websites in existence.
• (05:39) What Todd did to fight those issues:
  • New site design
  • New internal linking
  • New navigation structure
  • Deleted junk, irrelevant and out-of-date content
  • Redirected deleted content to other posts
  • Rewrote, combined and updated remaining content
• (06:18) After he completed all of that, Google rewarded him with a huge boost in traffic…in less than a week.
• (07:17) He deleted 30% of his existing content, but traffic to his other posts tripled.
• (07:46) Quality is the new SEO. It’s not about more. It’s about better.
• (09:58) This is a massive job, so you need to delegate and break it down piece-by-piece.

Just goes to show that there’s more than one way to grow your blog traffic. Plenty more to learn here 👇

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A Primer to Boost Your Content’s Readability

“Write as if you were talking to an eighth grader.” This is a phrase every marketer typically keeps in the back of their head when writing. And all it means is to keep things simple.

Honestly, though, it’s easier said than done. The crew at Content Marketing Institute is showing us a step-by-step guide to keeping readability on point.

1. Put the spotlight on your customer. More often than not, websites are way too self-centered. There’s a strong me-me-me kind of tone. It’s time to change the conversation. Instead of explaining how you do something, explain how your readers benefit. Remember, your content should:

• Be genuinely useful to the reader.
• Relate to the reader.
• Solve the reader’s problem.

3. Pick the right grade level. Content Marketing Institute writes their blogs at an 8th-grade level, eBooks at a 10th-grade level, and white papers at a 12th-grade level. Your audience could be completely different. Personas will help you pick the right grade of content.

8. Set a balance between conversational and formal tones. This depends on your audience and what they expect from you. Conversational means having a natural flow without totally losing grammatical rules. Formal means using an appropriate tone without losing readability.

Clarity wins by a landslide. Always.

9. Get fresh eyes involved in your editing process. We get it sometimes there just isn’t enough time to get someone to check you. But it’s a rookie mistake not to. A writer gets too close to their content. They miss subtle errors. Getting multiple people to look over your work and provide feedback is just common sense.

Diving into the technical fixes

• Long sentences are bad. Period.
• Look for shorter alternatives for longer words.
• Say, “Heck no!” to buzzwords, geekspeak, jargon, and acronyms. And if you have to use it, explain it.
• Adverbs don’t make everything pretty. Overusing adverbs can cause serious clutter, so watch out.

Test your readability score with any of these 10 free tools. Let us know which is your favorite in the FB Group after you try a few!

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The Away Game

Here’s the thing about Kenya…there’s not much ice or snow. Yet Kenya still has an ice hockey team.

Here’s the thing about that ice hockey team…there are no other teams in Kenya for them to play against.

So what did Tim Horton’s do? The coffee chain brought the Kenyans to Canada and had them suit up against a Canadian team. Of course, this isn’t really a fair matchup because Canadians play ice hockey the minute they’re born.

So Sidney Crosby, the world’s greatest hockey player (we’re not biased or anything), joined the Kenyan team. That made the teams a little more balanced.

We won’t spoil the game for you. This is just a feel-good ad to start your Tuesday off right.

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