We are now at Part 10 of my user engagement series and have covered a lot of ground. I encourage all of you to go back and view the previous parts before continuing because you’ll be astonished at some of the cool idea’s I presented along the way. Anyway, I wanted to discuss and very simple concept which many won’t think would affect user engagement. However, anyone who has been blogging for years and even submitted guest posts knows the importance of grammar, punctuation, and structure. I’m NOT going to jump into all of these elements and explain each one, but will like to explain why they are so important to achieve maximum engagement.
At this point, I’m going to think you guys obviously know what each element: grammar, punctuation, and structure all mean so will outline what happens when they are NOT optimized before publishing your content. Let’s get started…
Difficulty Understanding
Without having proper grammar and punctuation, your point is very hard to get across. This makes your content difficult to understand furthermore leading to decreased engagement. If I am trying to build loyalty or even get a conversion than it doesn’t help when my audience cannot skim through my content WITHOUT having to go back to understand it. There have been several blogs I’ve visited in the past and it’s taken me 20 minutes to understand some of them because of poor grammar and punctuation. I had to go back several times to understand a point which decreased overall engagement. I’ve probably gone back to 20% after leaving and that’s because they were able to correct the grammar issue going forward.
Decrease Traffic
From my experience, there are many impatient visitors who won’t continue to read if they detect errors with grammar or structure. Keep in mind you have enormous competition in your niche which means other information is readily available to your audience. Visitors, when searching for important information, don’t have the patience to go through content several times to understand it and grammar errors will cause this effect.
Ultimately this will lead to a decrease in traffic and effect your use engagement greatly. A decrease in traffic means lower social shares, etc.
Stagnant Growth
With a handful of errors, you have stagnant the growth of your business and this is due to reduced traffic flow. If you have a specific purpose or objective in mind, then it becomes much harder to achieve. Stagnant growth of a business has been responsible for business closing because they can’t afford the growing expenses each month. Even if you are an online business, you’ve probably invested in the following:
- Domains
- Hosting
- Tools
- Marketing
- Email service provider
If you are banking on long-term success to help you pay your monthly expenses than stagnant growth will definitely be a roadblock. However, in the next section you’ll learn how a simple tweak can fix this issue and can get you back on track.
What’s next?
The good news is you have many options available to get you back on track. I even use the first one which doesn’t cost me more than $30.00 per week and my team will edit 25 articles for me.
First, I’ll hire someone from Fiverr.com or depending on the rate from eLance.com. Both are awesome and I’ve found qualified people to get the job done. The trickiest part is to find someone who knows what they are doing, but once you secure an editor, you can depend on them to check for grammar, structure and punctuation.
Secondly, which I don’t suggest unless you have money to invest in a proper tool is to find an online portal which takes care of the complete process. There are some good ones available, but I haven’t tested them so make sure you do before investing. Here are a few from the top of my head:
- grammarly.com
- gingersoftware.com
- spellcheckplus.com
- polishmywriting.com
Third, get someone who you know FREE of charge to do the work for you. This is something which is NOT consistent because the person might NOT be around all the time to edit your work. However, if you are tight for cash than it is an option.