4 Tips on Smarter Archive Use
Regardless of your niche, your expertise or your writing quality, kicking off a blog is one of the hardest stages you’ll have to go through. Since I’m going through this myself with AlleNation, I know one of the most frustrating things about it is the fact that what I write today may not be read by the large(r) audience base I may have in 1, 3 and 6 months.
And since I’m putting much thought and time into writing articles on this blog, I figured it would be a shame that today’s article would collect dust and no traffic in the archives once it’s off the homepage.
If you’re writing long or thought-invested articles but haven’t yet gained a large reader base, you want to make sure you can refer and link to these articles later on, so they can be of-use and benefit both for you and your readers. This post is beyond using plugins and editing code, it’s about adjusting the way you write.
4 Tips on Smarter Archive Use - Efficient But Transparent
1. Use the a name=”" tags
As I started writing longer posts, I realized there must be a way to target only certain paragraphs/clauses of them for future reference. After a short hunt I found the a name tags.
Just place the tags before the text you want to specifically highlight and give it a value (name); from now on - if you want to link to that part set the href value to the www.posturl.com/#namevalue. (Example: jump to tip #2, #3, or #4)
2. Highlight your best posts on one page
When you feel there are enough valuable posts to include in one place, simply create a separate page and give it an appropriate name (Editor’s Pick, Best of..), now there’s more chance that an excellent post you wrote 8 months ago may be read (and mentioned) by someone who just visited your blog.
3. Don’t make your posts time-dependent
One of the things I like about Steve Pavlina’s blog is that you can read a post published 2 years ago and still find it relevant because his posts are appealing and valuable regardless of the changes that happen with time.
While it’s impossible to be a time-independent blogger all the time in certain niches, if you want your archives to work for you, you better take notice of this point.
4. Smart interlinking
Last but not least - link to your archives within your posts wherever you see appropriate, if you can find proof sequence or connection between a paragraph you’re writing now and a post you’ve written 3 months ago, don’t be afraid to refer your readers to it.
Those who consider this self promotion only do so because that’s what they’re doing when they are linking their posts together.
Well, not personally, but I read his review of you and came over. So he tells us that your not planning on monetizing your blog. Any particular reason??
#4 seems to be a good way to get feed readers back to your site as well. On days that I do it, it seems to increase my pageviews by as much as 50%.