Getting Readers into Your Blog Archives
One of the problems facing most bloggers is getting readers to access the archives sections of the blog. As bloggers, we might spend many hours researching, thinking, planning and then writing our posts. Once the post hits the internet, it sits there on our front page for a few hours or perhaps days, and then the post sinks down the page before disappearing into the archives of the blog. Depending on the profile of your blog, that post you agonised over may have a dozen or so readers or a few hundred if you are lucky.
What to do about it?
Related Posts
One of the techniques I use is to include a related posts listing at the end of the post. This directs readers to other posts I have made on the same topic. This seems quite an effective strategy because many visitors to this blog are reading multiple pages and not just the latest post.
Series of articles
Another technique I use is to write a numbered series of posts. These are on a theme or in a particular genre. For example, I am regularly posting some of my short fiction. These are numbered and also all of them are listed on a page in the navigation section, drawing readers’ attention to previous posts. Another series I am writing I have called “Writing Hints.” As these are posted the links draw the readers to other pages. In my birding blog I have written a series called “How to be a Birder.” Again, this is a numbered series which I hope will draw readers into the archives to read more.
Internal Linking
Another technique to use is internal linking. I used this technique in the above paragraph, linking key words (eg short fiction) and categories in this blog to other sections of the blog. (Note: In the previous paragraph I also used external linking to another of my blogs. The crossover between my blogs shows up as a strength in my statistics.)
Related article:
The motivation for this article comes from Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger. Darren has a long and very useful article on all the different techniques he uses to encourage readers to read in depth within his blogs. The article can be found here: