How To Keep Your Readers Reading

Nov 29

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What’s the point in blogging if no one reads your stuff? The internet is a big place. So the question is, how do you keep visitors on your site reading all of your wonderful content? Better yet, how do you get them to read the obscure posts that get buried over time? We have a great story on our travel blog about the fear-mongering we faced when we told people we were traveling to South America. (with a great reference to the Princess Bride, no less!) Sadly, no one clicks on it. Ditto for our Avocado and Tofu Salad. All because these posts are buried in the archives.

There are a couple of options to getting your posts read. Here are 3 things you can do to keep your visitors on your site for longer:

1. Use the related posts plugin (if you are using WordPress). It’ll insert as many links as you want at the bottom of your post, allowing your visitors (and google search-bots) to crawl to other related stories. It works based on tags, so if you haven’t tagged your post, ýou have the option of showing your top-commented posts, or just random posts.

Although there is talk on the internet about doing this manually (which incidently, you’ll have to if you’re using Blogger), I find the plugin lets me focus on creating content, instead of links. (I find the problem with creating the related links manually is that they only link to pages that you’ve already written. You have to keep on updating the links to refer to newer posts.) The plug-in allows you to include related posts in the feeds as well.

2. Place links to your best work on the side bar. For example, on our travel blog, whattheduck.ca, we’ve posted the top 3 popular stories as well as the top 3 commented stories, along readers to reach the pages you are most proud of.

3. Create contextual links within your posts themselves. Apparently well linked pages are popular to both readers and search-bots. Plus, it allows readers who just joined in to catch up on previous events. Our adventures eating guinea pig in Peru are linked to our brush with death in the catacombs of San Francisco, as well as the time we ate alpaca on route to Machu Picchu.

Good luck, and get read!