Boring your readers
written on July 2, 2008 in Blogging, Tips & Tricks
I’m going to be honest and blunt about this. Sponsored posts are BORING. Unless you have an amazing knack to turn even the most dry topics (like fake plants) into something that will fascinate the people asides from your gardener, people will usually choose to not comment, or even read your sponsored posts. Admit it, writing it is boring, so how can you expect the people reading it to be entertained? If it wasn’t for the money behind it to motivate you, would you still write about the alpine industry? Probably not.
The thing with writing sponsored posts is that the more you write, the more it decreases the overall quality of your blog. From what I’ve read of other people’s (and my own) sponsored posts, they all sound boring and dead. To me it’s like watching the commercials on TV minus all the excitement. It repels readers, or at least, I get repelled away when I see that the first couple posts are sponsored posts. I go to a blog expecting to find some interesting content or at least to hear about your day. Not to listen to you talk about police gear, unless you happened to be a police or the owner of the store.
I know I sound like a hypocrite right now, because that is what I’ve been doing for the past couple months. It didn’t occur to me at first because obviously I don’t view my site the same way a regular visitor would, but after seeing the trend on other sites, I began to realize how ANNOYING it was. So I propose a simple solution:
Pair your sponsored posts with a quality, non-sponsored post. What does this mean? Basically, if you’re going to write a sponsored post, go for it. But right after you write it, write another decent, non-sponsored post, so your quality post will be the first one your readers see, not the one about anxiety medicine. As far as I’m concerned, no rules are being broken by doing this, because usually as long as the sponsored post is on the main page of your blog, the post order is irrelevant. So why not have your readers come to your site and read something decent, so they won’t think that your blog is a wolf under sheep skin? For example, this post will be the first you see and hopefully read when you arrive at my blog, not any other sponsored post. In short, always make sure the first post on your blog is a quality post.
Yes, you’re still writing humdrum sponsored posts and in a sense you are deceiving your readers, but at the same time, you’re making it easier for them. Now they don’t have to filter and skim through posts just to find that something good and real you wrote.Error processing request
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