How to improve your blog
Neil Patel over at his Pronet Advertising blog has posted an interesting article called 5 Ways to Building a Better Blog.
Neil highlights the importance of writing quality content on your blog. He also emphasises the need to look after readers of you blog.
Links:
Getting return visitors to your blog
Rick on his blog Shards of Consciousness has a post called “Three ways to get me back to your blog” where he highlights the importance of style of your blog. He says that light text on a dark background is a real put off for him. The text has to be very easy to read.
I agree.
If a blog or website has small white text on a black background I only stay a few seconds. If I don’t move on quickly, my eyes start to hurt badly. They’ve lost my attention.
Quite a discussion is happening on this topic on Rick’s site. Visit it here. (Sorry – the link no longer works.)
Updated November 2013.
An intriguing idea
Until today I had never heard of author DBA Lehane. This author has a blog called Short Short Fiction.
On this blog the author takes the word of the day from Dictionary.com and uses it in a short story.
Every day.
Such discipline and creativity is to be commended. I’m not sure that I could keep up the pace – or the pressure. He limits the stories to 500 words and warns that they are only a first and rough draft.
301 lists become a story
Some people are amazingly creative.
A few days ago I wrote about the group writing project being run by Darren Rowse at ProBlogger. He invited readers to submit a list – on any topic. He received 301 entries. I have started trolling through these for ideas and hints, especially those relating to writing.
Liz Strauss on her Successful Blog has started writing a story called A List Becomes 301 Links in Story . So far she has published 4 chapters.
Getting Readers into Your Blog Archives
One of the problems facing most bloggers is getting readers to access the archives sections of the blog. As bloggers, we might spend many hours researching, thinking, planning and then writing our posts. Once the post hits the internet, it sits there on our front page for a few hours or perhaps days, and then the post sinks down the page before disappearing into the archives of the blog. Depending on the profile of your blog, that post you agonised over may have a dozen or so readers or a few hundred if you are lucky.
What to do about it?
Related Posts
One of the techniques I use is to include a related posts listing at the end of the post. This directs readers to other posts I have made on the same topic. This seems quite an effective strategy because many visitors to this blog are reading multiple pages and not just the latest post.
Series of articles
Another technique I use is to write a numbered series of posts. These are on a theme or in a particular genre. For example, I am regularly posting some of my short fiction. These are numbered and also all of them are listed on a page in the navigation section, drawing readers’ attention to previous posts. Another series I am writing I have called “Writing Hints.” As these are posted the links draw the readers to other pages. In my birding blog I have written a series called “How to be a Birder.” Again, this is a numbered series which I hope will draw readers into the archives to read more.
Internal Linking
Another technique to use is internal linking. I used this technique in the above paragraph, linking key words (eg short fiction) and categories in this blog to other sections of the blog. (Note: In the previous paragraph I also used external linking to another of my blogs. The crossover between my blogs shows up as a strength in my statistics.)
Related article:
The motivation for this article comes from Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger. Darren has a long and very useful article on all the different techniques he uses to encourage readers to read in depth within his blogs. The article can be found here: