Duncan over at The Blog Herald has a great post on Making your blog sticky which is a second post (first one is here) on what he’s doing at his great blog to make readers stick around after surfing in for the first time to one of his individual archive pages. Its a great article with some useful tips that I’m going to consider playing with.
I am particularly interested in his experimentation with the ‘Recent Posts’ plug in that he’s implemented at the base of each of his posts. I’ve been considering doing that on one of my blogs which has struggled to get people to view more than one page per visit.
In making this move on Blog Herald he now estimates that 60% of his readers now read more than one article on his blog per session in comparison to 10% a month ago. Thats a serious improvement!
if you look at Blog Herald its good that he got a 10% rise in readership.
Cool functionality he’s adding. And also i have some advice for him, although it may or may not work for the type of readership he has and site content.
1. Use a better font. (present one is kinda tricky on the eyes)
2. Add more pictures and make them larger. (bring some feeling to the site)
just my two cents.It’s worth a try and you can always take ’em out if it don’t work. Right now his site looks super dry. Too much text. (i’m also not his target audience from a content standpoint just to put that in perspective)
j
I agree, an easier-to-read font would encourage people to stick around longer. I’d also break up those monster blocks of text into smaller paragraphs, so it doesn’t intimidate readers so much. It’s tough going reading the longer blocks of text on that site.
The content seems quite good, though.
Interesting comments guys – to be honest I’d never really considered those aspects of the Blog Herald – maybe because I tend to read him initially in News Aggregator and when i do go to his actual site I’m usually there specifically because I like something that he writes and am concentrating on the content itself.
Having said that I agree with what you say in the text based nature of the site – especially on the longer posts like the one’s I’ve linked to in this post.
I don’t really have a problem with his font though – is fine on my screen.
I just read his blog his tip is good and is worth trying in my new blog. That made me stick to reading his post although, I do need some resting place for my eyes once in a while.
I imagine such a ‘recent posts’ feature would require a dynamic blog system where individual entry pages are created on the fly? Either that or you’d need to rebuild your individual entries every few days to keep the posts current.
The default on Movable Type is for static pages, which means once a post is saved the individual entry page won’t be updated until you rebuild, thus the recent entries it lists will be as current as your last rebuild.
Do other systems have a better solution for this? And has anyone tried Movable Type’s dynamic page-generation? I know they have the option, but I haven’t looked into it much.