Chewing Bubble Gum, Kicking Ass & Giving Your Blog a Purpose

I Have Come to Chew Bubble Gum and Kick Ass…

I really cannot recall how many times I have used the amazing line uttered by Rowdy Roddy Piper in the movie ‘They Live.’ I absolutely love it. Roddy walks into a bank, states his purpose, and then proceeds to deliver on his promise of kicking ass. To everyone that was listening  it was perfectly clear what his next course of action was going to be.

This “Purpose Driven, Bubble Gum Chewing, Ass Kickery” can be applied to your blog.

When someone comes to visit your blog their basic reason for being there is to read your post. Once they have completed that task, they move onto something else. That may be leaving your site, making a comment, sharing the post or shooting up a bank. Each person that visits your blog will have a different perogative and the truth is…

That Really Sucks for You.

People generally follow a pattern when they read through a blog post. They do what they have always done, and on the rare occasion they will do something out of their regular pattern. The fact is that if you want a reader to do a specific action when they have completed reading you need to tell them to do it otherwise they will just continue doing what they always have done.

Think about your blog for a moment and come up with what is the number one thing that you would like the reader to do. Here are a few ideas:

• Subscribe to the blog
• Join your newsletter
• Leave a comment
• Hire you

With many blog layouts there is just a ton of ‘noise’ on the page (ads, categories, sign up forms etc) and there is no real clear course of action. Now if you have a blog that is getting a ton of traffic this scatter gun approach may work just fine, but for those that are only getting a few hits per day you really need to capitalize on the actions of your readers. Make an adjustment to your post pages and make it abundantly clear what the reader should do next.

At the time of writing this post my main request for readers is to share the post within a few of the top social networks. Does my layout make this clear?