Keeping New Readers

Problogger has a short series of posts with tips on how to keep readers who have stumbled across your site via a search engine hit or some other method. Interesting stuff, though nothing groundbreaking, and as it turns out, I do most of what he recommends already.

In Part One:

• No real tips here, it’s just the introduction. He does point out that over time, the majority of hits to a blog are not to the main entry page, but to archive pages that turn up in search engine queries, which is very true. On any given day, there are a number of older pages that are likely to get as many or more hits than my main page.

  For the curious, a quick list of my most popular entries, as determined by what I remember seeing pop up regularly on my StatCounter ‘popular pages’ listing, and in no particular order:

  • Honda Accord Ad
  • LiveJournal RSS feeds
  • Reading protected LiveJournal entries via RSS (I think some people hit this one trying to ‘hack’ into protected entries that they don’t have access too…this, however, doesn’t do that.)
  • Get your DJ Name! (Apparently there’s a shortage of imagination out there.)
  • ‘Up-skirt’ photography ‘reprehensible’ but legal (Usually seems to be people hunting for photos. Sorry folks!)
  • Seattle Storm Lauren Jackson in the buff (Again, generally people looking for photos. Again, no luck here.)
  • Even Microsoft wants G5s
  • Of blogging and unemployment

(Anybody surprised by those last two? I know I’m not…)

In Part Two:

• Good individual page design: I think I’m pretty solid here. My individual pages match my main page, with some slight tweaks here and there to better fit their status as more focused pages than the main page is.
• Make your message clear: I’m not so strong here, but then, I don’t really have a single focus for the site.
• Provide pathways into your blog: Suggestions here include obvious links to the home page, an about page, and archives, all of which I have prominently displayed at the top of each page.

In Part Three:

• Links to other relevant entries: Another one I think I’m pretty solid with, thanks to the category links beneath the title and the ‘Related Entries’ section of the sidebar.
• E-mail this entry to a friend: This one I don’t have set up. I’ve seen it other places, but never figured it would have that much use. Maybe I should re-think that one.
• Promote via newsletter: This one I’m not even interested in trying to maintain. I’m bad enough about keeping up with things (including, at times, this site), trying to maintain a newsletter of any sort would die a quick death. Again, though, as I don’t have a specific focus for the site, that’s probably less of a concern for me.

In Part Four:

• Promote your RSS feed: Sometimes I wonder if I should do more here — while I have the ‘Feeds’ link in the site menubar, there may be people who don’t recognize the significance of that. Perhaps renaming that to (the dull but obvious term) RSS would be a good idea. I’m not sure if there’s much need or demand for me to start enabling RSS feeds for every post on my site, though I consider it from time to time.
• Search this site: Again, we’re good here — the search box is nice, obvious, and ‘above the fold’ on every page.
• Break up longer posts into multiple posts: My only difficulty with this one is that I never plan long posts, they just sort of happen…and then they tend to be stream-of-consciousness enough that it would be difficult to break them apart. I don’t think I’ll concern myself with this one too much.
• Be interactive: While I don’t always respond to every comment left, I do keep track of any comments left here, and do my best to respond as much as possible (time, energy, and available brainpower dependent, of course).

Not a bad set of tips, all in all. Maybe I’ll tinker with a couple more things here and there.

(via Neuvo)

“Acperiance 1” by Hardfloor from the album Harthouse: The Point of No Return Chapter 1 (1993, 8:58).