Bloggers: Less is more

I've found over the week that cutting back from having 5-6 articles per page down to 1-2 really increases my readership. Return readers is up nearly 600%, and people entering deeper links is up nearly 1000% (this is in just a week).

If you're a blogger, work on getting your readers to dig deeper to read other articles.

 

Yea, I hadn't touched my site from the first until yesterday and traffic grew. Go figure. Most of it was return visits. Probably people wondering if I'd posted anything new...

 

Say what you have to say, no more, no less

 

Right. But also don't use the default publishing settings of putting around 10 posts on the home page. Get people to click deeper. In every blog I post now, I link certain words to other blogs of mine in the same context. Some single visits turn out to be worth 30 impressions (and a higher CTR).

 

that's great advice dadasays...

 

I agree, organize your blog well so that people can find stories related to the ones they like easily (something I'm really bad at)

 

Ok. This might be a coincidence, but when I cut down from having all of my posts on the front page (it's a newish blog) to having 6 posts, Google indexed most of my archive pages. But the thing is, in Blogger I can't find a way (without hard-coding) to get links on the main page to some of the earlier posts.

But, the increased visitors from Google kind of makes up for that while I work something out.

 

I believe it has something to do with that, Google likes structure, finding related topics and have things categorized. No coincidence

 

I use dblogger for all my blogs. It puts one post per page, and is pretty much my secret weapon.. Not so secret anymore huh?

 

geniosity: Why don't you want to hard code your most popular blogs anyway?

One way to do it is to create really OLD blog posts containing indexes to certain subjects, and then sticking those blog index posts in your template. Every time you blog about something in that index topic, go back and edit that index blog post and add the new link.

Works well.

Jellyfish: Blogger.com lets you set 1 blog post per page. I actually run 1 day of posts per page

 

FREAKING GENIUS!!! Thanks. I will definitely be trying that one. I was thinking of adding an Index down the left, turning my page into a 3 column layout, but that would mean editing it every time I posted (hence the request NOT to hard-code)... But your way sounds brilliant..

 

Surely the vast amount of visitors find you through the search engines? If so, then they only see one article at a time, and depending on how you have your blog organised with recent posts and related post links, then they don't really visit the home page. Repeat visitors will most likely be those who have subscribed to your feed and then see a post and pop in, again only visiting the one page.

The only reason I can think of to reduce the articles on your home page is to increase the keyword density of your focussed keywords. Its something I've started to consider, but I'll experiment and see what happens.

Andy

 

Unfortunately I don't have a vast amount of visitors just yet... But previously, I had all my posts on one (long) page. Not good if the visitors DO like my site and want to read more. All my ads will be at the top.

So, breaking my site down will "force" visitors to go to other pages if they like my content. And, hopefully I will get to a stage where my content will be good...

 

I usually put 2, max 3 posts!
When i put 10 or more the ads were not very targeted :/

 

max 5 post for me
agree that ads get a bit out of place when more post are added.

 

FREAKING GENIUS!!! Thanks.

Haha, I wouldn't go that far

I will definitely be trying that one.

Make sure you pre-date your entries BEFORE your first posts.

If you have search engines sending readers to consistent older articles, try putting a "Check out our newest post" link at the end of the article (edit older articles). People are "Home-blind" to the home page button, but if you tempt them with a link titled "Check out our newest post" they'll click it!