Keep Readers On Your Site & Reading Your Other Posts

[ Read the previous posts in the Blogging 101 for Pastors series. ]

Here’s a quick tip I was thinking about, which I learned from reading Darren’s ProBlogger excellent blog:

One great way of keeping your readers on your blog is to mention previous posts in new posts.

Obviously, this needs to be smooth. Work in links to other posts naturally. Don’t just be writing about your ministry’s new Web site redesign and then say, “Did you read my post on spacewalking?” or some other unrelated subject.

Make them applicable to other posts.

The idea is to expose your readers to your other great content you’ve written.

For instance, in this series, as I have given various tips, I’ll try to find related posts and link to them.

Here’s what I do: First, I write the post, thinking as I go if I have similar articles buried in my articles I can link to. Then, after I’m done, I’ll go back and scan to see if there’s anything I might have missed.

Doing this series, as you’ll notice, I always put a bracket with the tag: [Read all the previous posts in this series here.] This is one way to increase my reader’s pageviews and the chances they’ll come back or continue reading.

As you post regularly, you’ll notice when you track your site statistics that you’ll get a percentage of people coming to you via the search engines, or from links at other blogs. (You are tracking your site stats, right?)

For those readers, you have one shot to get them to peruse your other content, or they’ll just keep driving past your blog to the next one.

The goal is: You want them to stay awhile, enjoy themselves, subscribe to your blog via a feedreader or through an email newsletter … because face it, you’ve taken a lot of time to write that content and actually want living, breathing human beings to read it, not just the search engine spiders.

I know I do.

Another quick way to give readers access to other buried content is through a popular or “best of” posts section in your sidebar. Look at mine in the left-hand column.

These are posts that generally show up in my site stats on a regular basis as a more popular post, or content that I took great pains in writing and don’t want buried beneath other posts.

The last way I’ll mention is that sometimes people will come to your site via links to previous posts. The main index page for the Blogging 101 series is my top page so far for obvious reasons. But if someone just sees that, they may not realize that I have other fresh, recent content.

If you’ll look at the top left column, I list the latest 8-10 post headlines on my blog (a feature of Feedburner). So when someone comes to a buried archives page, like my map of the 25 fastest growing churches in America, the freshest content is always there ready for a quick mouse click.

Hey, thanks for reading! And staying around!

[ Read the previous posts in the Blogging 101 for Pastors series. ]

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