4 Tips To Help Get Readers To Stick Around On Your WordPress Blog
Sunday, September 2nd, 2007Categories: Wordpress
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Great content isn’t the only part of the recipe to getting visitors/readers to stick around and read your WordPress blog. Sometimes, readers need a little help to keep them reading articles and getting involved with your content and articles.
When readers stick to your blog, it may help build a reader base and RSS subscribers. This can never be a bad thing, even if, statistically, return readers are not ad clickers, it can always help with word-of-mouth and getting backlinks.
1 - Display Your Recent Articles
Whether it’s on your sidebar, or at the end of your article, this is always a great feature to have. Occasionally, a reader may get to an article you wrote and enjoy its content so much, they want to read more of your blog, but don’t quite know where to start. Give them direction.
How To Display Recent Articles
This is fairly easy. Once you get into your WordPress admin panel (typically www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/), select Presentation. Now select Widgets. Using the sidebar widgets editor, you can drag and drop the Recent Articles element into your sidebar. By hitting the graphic beside the name, you can configure settings such as the title and number of posts to show.
2 - Display Related Articles
Like displaying a list of recent articles, a first-time reader may like your content so much, they’d love to read up on similar subjects. Give it to them, make it easier for them. Don’t make them search through your archives or have to go through the trouble of typing keywords into your search dialog.
How To Display Related Articles
Unfortunately, this feature was not built into WordPress. Thanks to the wonderful world of plugins, the people at w-a-s-a-b-i.com made it happen. Their website has been down for sometime, so I rezipped the required files so you can have a Working Download for the Related Articles Plugin. By default, the plugin analyzes the titles of your articles, but there are ways to configure otherwise. I included the readme file because it can explain everything a lot easier then I can.
3 - Link Between Your Own Posts
It’s a fairly simple strategy. You shouldn’t feel guilty plugging your own content.
If you briefly mention Backlinks, for example, and you’ve written pages of articles about them, link to category page about Backlinks. It can only help, right? If they want to know more about the content, there’s a direct link to your own article for them to click on. It helps eliminate the risk of the reader returning to Google and typing in different keywords to find that same information, but from another website.
4 - Give The User Direction At The End Of Articles
After a reader goes through your well-written, long-winded article, give them direction. If not, they might end up hitting the Back Button or returning back to Google. Use this space to link to Recent Articles, Related Posts or articles you think they might find interesting. This is more important if your article extends beyond the direction given from the sidebar. You might even consider using this as a place to throw a Google Ad.
Good luck, hope that helps.
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September 3rd, 2007 at 10:11 am
Hey pat! this one is really helpful, but I omit the recent article widget on my blog. Now you made me think again of putting it back. thanks for dropping by on my site!
September 3rd, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Thanks derek! It is really useful, I’d heavily recommend it over say, the recent readers widget.