You can significantly increase the number of people who read and understand your content by answering the following questions:

• Why you publish?
• For whom you publish?
• How can your content be accessed/found?

Recently I read somewhere that more than 90% people don’t read 80% of what you have written on your website. Why does this happen, and why in the first place you post your content — blog posts for instance — online?

You publish content to inform people — sometimes for the sake of being helpful in an altruistic manner (publishing informative content during natural or man made calamities), to showcase your talent and promote your skills (as a writer, for example), to earn revenue through advertising and affiliate programs, or to convince them to do business with you. You also publish content to improve search engine rankings but that content doesn’t matter much if it brings you redundant traffic.

Once you have figured out why you publish content on your blog or website, the next two important questions are, why people must read your content and how they can access/find your content. You can exceptionally increasing the number of people reading your content if you can sort out these three questions.

So why must people read your content?

They must need your content, whatever may that need be. They may need it to solve a problem (programming problem, technical problem, psychological problem…whatever). They may need it to make a buying decision; the sales pitch on your website or your blog post describing the benefits of your product or service. They may need it for entertainment. Unfortunately, they may also need it in the times of crisis and disaster.

For your content to be highly readable, it has to be needed, needed desperately if possible. If you can provide such content, it hardly matters how you present it (as long as it is readable).  When your content satisfies a need, people read it hungrily and they wait for it in great anticipation.  In fact they employ all the means available to them to make sure that they never miss what you publish.  This is a great state to accomplish as a publisher.

For whom should you publish?

As it is famously said somewhere every writer has an audience. You just need to find your audience or figure out who your audience is. It is very easy to be read if you have got an eager audience.  Being your audience means they already need your content and that is why they are part of the audience in the first place.

If you publish elementary computer tips on your website or blog then your audience constitutes of people who are not very well-versed with computers and they are looking for basic operational guidance. Similarly, if you are writing copy for a website that sells winter garments then your audience are people who are looking for winter clothes, have lots of choice at their hands, and need to be convinced that they must buy the clothes at this particular website. When you know your audience you can specifically write for them, and they are extremely receptive.

How can your content be accessed/found

It’s just not enough to publish great content for the right audience — your audience must be made aware of the existence of your content. Here are a few methods you can employ to make the right people find your content:

• Search engines: Search engines are the best source of quality audience for your content because when people come from search engines they are already looking for something like what you can offer.  To achieve this you should create your content according to the language used by your audience.  Optimize your content for the right keywords and expressions that fundamentally define your content.
• Blogs and websites: Quality content in itself attracts incoming links from other web sites and blogs and this in turn gets you the right audience.  You can make other blogs and websites aware of your content by either directly writing to the owners or by interacting in the comment sections.
• Social bookmarking and networking websites: Websites like Digg, Delicious, Twitter and Facebook can get thousands of interested readers to your website provided you have built a following on these websites.

Success content implementation involves continuously creating quality content and promoting it using all the avenues available to you. It may seem daunting to a person who is interested in performing just one task, writing content or promoting it. Nothing wrong in that.  You can hire somebody for the job you don’t like doing.  The basic point is, creation and promotion must happen at the same time for the most effective implementation of your content and copywriting strategy.

There is an avalanche of articles and blog posts teaching you how to write well. Even “reputed” and “revered” bloggers and content publishers cannot resist publishing these clichéd blog posts and articles that are perpetually regurgitating the stuff that has already been told to you at least 133 million times. They almost, always begin with: put the reader first. What exactly does that mean? Does it mean always trying to please your readers and write about things that only cater to their whims and fancies or does it mean actually writing something that benefits them? Most writers who teach you how to write seem to be focusing on the former. It should be the latter.

Whenever you are starting to write a new blog post, an article, or even a business webpage for one of your clients or for yourself think about why the reader should read what you are writing. Are you merely trying to please your visitors so that they visit your blog or website again and again or do you really intend to communicate your actual feelings?

To be honest I too have tried my hand at a couple of blog posts that were merely written to generate traffic because I felt people wanted to read such blog posts. But this is a myth promoted by web writers and bloggers who don’t want you to try something new and want to keep the territory safe for them. Don’t write for your readers to please them, write for them to really share something genuine with them otherwise it begins to sound stale and inconsequential eventually. Have you noticed the deluge of how-to lists and resource lists that tell you 50 ways of doing this and 100 ways of doing that? Do you ever follow those 50 or 100 methods? I am sure you save them (as I often do) thinking that someday you will definitely use them. These people publish these lists simply because they know that such lists draw lots of traffic and encourage people to bookmark them. They rarely go beyond that. So how can you really benefit your readers?

Share with them instead of presenting to them chunks of information and lists of methods and tips. Be one of them. For example have a look at Steve Pavlina’s blog; I think life improvement blogs will come, make a mark, create some ripples and instant celebrities, and go, but Steve’s blog is going to sustain. This is because he doesn’t present lists of things that can help you become a super achiever. He simply shares with you his experiences. He doesn’t sound like an expert or an authority figure. He automatically becomes an authority by sharing whatever he experiences and learns.

This is how you focus on your readers when you write; you become one of them. Don’t preach them, don’t tell them to do this and that in order to attain Nirvana. Simply, share your growth with them, share your experiences, and encourage them to share theirs.