Blogging for a Mobile Audience

4G might be mostly made up, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that mobile internet traffic is expected to quadruply increase by the middle of the decade. Ever-increasing smartphone sophistication and the abundance of wireless internet connections is making mobile web access an easy option for just about anyone with a data plan. Bloggers need to take this into consideration if they know what’s good for them. The majority of your readers and followers will soon be familiar with you almost exclusively through their mobile device. When this occurs, will your blog be findable, readable, and above all enjoyable?

For instance, are your posts properly centered? Mobile web browsers center on a site by default. Blogs where the posts play second fiddle to ads, videos, and images that litter the main section of the page are going to be skipped over by people who either can’t find the content or who don’t have the patience to look for it on a 3.5 inch screen. If you’re looking for building up readership, a failure to center your content can count the mobile audience out.

This applies to any form of blogging but is critical when it comes to banking on a mobile audience: are your posts short and sweet? They better be, or else people on their mobile devices aren’t going to take the time to read them. Most people shy away from amateur articles over 500 words long, and when looking at articles on a small screen this prejudice is only increased further. Learning to say what you have to in a minimalistic yet entertaining fashion will make you a better blogger overall.

Bloggers need to be utilizing the awesome power of Twitter. But more importantly, they need to Tweet at the right time. Sending out a message in the middle of the workday is not likely to generate much attention from your readers who are probably busy. Waiting until the start of the evening is smart if you want to capture the energy of the mobile post-work social media catch up that occurs across the country at the conclusion of the work day.

But perhaps the easiest, yet most important, thing to remember when considering the mobile audience, is testing visiting your blog on all available mobile web browsers. Rounding up the right combination of friends and family who have the devices with the browsers you need to use will be the toughest part, but by being able to see how your blog looks to mobile visitors, you’ll be immediately aware of problems that may otherwise take months to uncover.
Mobile traffic is set to become the dominant source of your blog’s visitors. That is of course if you take the time to make sure your blog is mobile-friendly.