This is post #2 of 2 from the Ghost Post Article Set.
This article focuses on tips and strategies you can use and incorporate into your own blog to keep your past content attracting readers. When I say “past content”, I’m referring to articles you’ve written but have found their way off your main page, or index page, if you prefer.
On a side-note, I’ll be using the terms blog and website interchangeably, because, well, they are interchangeable.
Featured Posts
Featured Posts are quite common among blog-oriented websites and can usually be spotted out by the bigger-than-the-rest CSS element containing some sort of image or heading that is associated with the post’s content that is larger than ‘normal’ for the rest of the content on the page, and more often than that, you can distinguish the featured post by it’s larger-than-the-rest font-size. This, of course, is variable, and one could place a featured article/post anywhere on the website one wanted to using many different methods to draw attention to it. *Gasp* And, yes, sometimes in the title of the post you might find: “Featured Post:”.
In the image above you can view an example of a featured posts section on the LifeHack website. While this is on the index page, you could incorporate this type of blog element into your own blog anywhere you wanted. Sometimes it might take a little imagination or creativity, but this is your website. It’s worth taking the time to think up strategical concepts to ensure the blog is as robust as possible.
Another common place for a featured post to be residing would be somewhere in your sidebar. This would be the most practical approach to go with if you were attempting to draw attention to an article that no longer held a place on the index page but was important nonetheless.
User Rated Articles
User Rated Articles rely on the website’s visitor participation. Typically, the user can either vote the post up, vote the post down, or rate the article on some sort of scale — usually by clicking a star icon (I’m shocked the icons haven’t gotten more original), and then the posts are listed in order from greatest to least by that particular article’s median score.
This method of incorporating a featured section on your blog is a bit more involved. You wouldn’t be able to do this with CSS/HTML/XHTML, but you can do this with a bit of PHP. If you’re not comfortable enough with PHP to code something like this yourself, chances are you can find something free on the internet to use instead. If you use a CMS, or Content Management System, your chances of finding a plugin or widget are greatly improved. There are probably hundreds of these types of plugins available for the Wordpress CMS alone.
Thanks to WP Scoop for the example used in the image above.
Related Articles
This method is another that would involve some sort of PHP or Javascript to implement, but this is just as easy to find on the internet fully coded and ready to go.
Usually based on the content of the article you’re currently viewing, a ‘related articles’ plugin typically crawls your website for matching content or a matching heading that it believes could possibly be related. It then displays a list, generally defined by you in terms of the number of related posts listed, of which your blog reader will hopefully take advantage of. This is probably the easiest and most efficient method of increasing page views.
In the image above you can see our own implementation of a related posts plugin for Wordpress. The placement is typically in the same area we have our own positioned, at the end of an article or page you’re viewing. Again however, placement is absolutely subjective, and with a little time and effort, you could start a trend.
Hard-Linking To Related Articles
If your articles are in a set, much like this one is, be sure to link to the other articles in that specific group or set. Not only does this give your readers a heads up on where the information originally began, but it’s a great way to increase pageviews.
Search Engines
Make sure all of your content is being crawled and indexed by search engines. Organic traffic generated from search engines can a lot of times make up for slow days when your website isn’t generating a lot of traffic directly, through other website sources, or your RSS feed. Some websites even depend 100% on organic traffic.
Article Comments
A lot of website/blog traffic generally originates from search engines such as Google, as discussed above, and a lot of times you’ll receive legitimate comments on articles that were first posted months and months ago. One of the single most important things you can do as a blog author or website administrator is to participate in user-discussion via comments. Not only does this stir things up a bit with your article being the focal point, but it keeps those same visitors coming back to your website and potentially motivating other blog readers to participate in the discussion as well.
It is also not uncommon for articles with a high number of comments to be considered a featured article and treated as so. You wouldn’t want to display this featured article in the main content area however, but a generally good place to display this type of featured article would be the sidebar.
Random Articles
Article 1 of the “Ghost Post” article set was Wordpress oriented and supplied a code snippet of how to go about fetching random posts from a certain category and then displaying them on your website somewhere. We did not, however, go over where one might want to place them.
Above is an example of one way you could use this method to generate traffic directed towards past content. We displayed the Wordpress code-snippet at the bottom of our Design Category archive listing. The code scanned through all articles that were posted in this specific category, regardless of which category archive page you would find the link to the articles on, and displayed them in a CSS styled list.
Again, you could place this list in the sidebar, which a lot of times is the “go to” place to position certain website elements when you can’t think of a better one.
Other places where you might want to consider placing something like this..
- The 404 page
- The regular archive listings — not just the category based ones
- A page displaying user generated search results
- The footer
- At the end of an article in addition to or for the replacement of the related articles method discussed above
Archive Listings By Author
This tip is one I’m sure most of you haven’t thought about, at least not intentionally. An archive listing of all the articles written by a specific author can bring attention to past content because the number of articles listed probably won’t be as numerous as some of your other archive-type listings; thus bringing more attention to posts that otherwise might not be noticed as heavily, it offers one more opportunity to have that past content recognized and hopefully read by your website visitors, and also, this could be another great opportunity to insert a Featured Post or Top Rated post at the beginning of the archive listing, or mixed somewhere within the rest of the article listings. A good rule of thumb when mixing a featured post or an advertising spot within the rest of your content is to make it seem a bit separated. That is, make sure your readers know that this content element is different in some way.
Ghost Post Article #1 – Random Posts In Wordpress Without Plugins
Thanks to Christopher at astro-geek.com for the initial inspiration and contributing ideas for the article set.
