We all know that most readers won’t read your entire post. Not only that, but it’s also been proven that most people won’t read any more than your headline. Knowing this, it sometimes may make your blogging efforts seem unimportant. And while this information does make you want to spend a big chunk of time on crafting the right titles and headline, there actually are some tactics you can employ that will help you move people further down the page to read some of the meat of your content. To help you do this, here are three things you can begin doing with your blogs that will encourage readers to move below the fold.
Get Past the First 50 Words
We’ve already stated that the headline is generally the most read part of your blog. While you may think that readership steadily drops off after that, that actually may not be the case. According to D Bnonn Tennant, a contributor to Kissmetrics.com, if you can get people past the first 50 words of your blog post, the chances of them dropping off actually get pretty low up until 500 words. For this reason, it’s crucial that you make your first 50 words count. Once you’re able to get over this hurdle, helping your reader move through your blog becomes a lot easier.
Use Images to Break Up Text
If you were able to make the title of your blog interesting enough for someone to click on it, it’s now your primary focus to make the overall aesthetic of your blog intriguing enough for someone to stay for as long as possible. Because readers are so interested in the visual aspect of online content, using images and colors to break up your text is a great way to help your readers move through your post. Neil Patel, a contributor to HubSpot.com, recommends using half-width images to make your lines of text shorter. This will subconsciously make the reader think there is less text to read and may encourage them to scroll through more of your content.
Move Comments Up Higher On the Page
A lot of readers rely on social proof to let them know if a piece of content is worth their time to read. However, you can’t really get a large amount of social proof without having people read and share your content. One way you can speed up the process of obtaining a good amount of social proof, according to the Blog Tyrant’s post on ProBlogger.com, is to encourage every reader to leave a comment about your post and then move the comments up higher on your page. This will make it so the reader doesn’t have to scroll down too far to see that there’s already a critical dialogue taking place regarding your content and entice them to become a part of it.
The real estate above the fold is crucial to your blog’s success. However, you can make the content below the fold just as well read. Use the tips mentioned above to help you do just that.