This post was written by Jennifer
Try Adding A Current Event Link To Your Posts
Over at Tree Hugging Family, co-blogger Peggy and I have been trying some different blog traffic building techniques out. If they work out, I may be sharing some here so that you can give them a shot at your blog. The first new trick we tried in May was a current event link.
A major issue at THF is that we post a lot, always have some sort of feature and poll going on, and we often have contests too. Who can keep up? We were trying to keep readers up to date with links before, but it got super annoying to end each post like this:
“Don’t forget to enter our contest, oh and this contest, and check in at the poll. We’re also running some special features this month like blah feature and blah feature, AND hey, are you signed up for our current green challenge?”
That’s like six links and it’s obnoxious. Plus, although we have a contact us page, it seems that people can’t find it, because we’d get comments like, “How do I contact you?”
We decided to try a current event link. Here’s what we did:
At the start of May we wrote one post and titled it current events. We made one basic link back that says, “Click here to learn about all the current contests, themes, and green challenges going on at Tree Hugging Family in May 2008” Now, if you click on it, you’ll see that we have all our contests, features, and events, posted in link form in this post, plus we included easy to find contact information.
We’ve been updating this one current event post all month, and then we’ve been simply inserting this link at the end of each and every post we write.
Has it worked?:
So far on our end, it’s been much simpler than a massive reminder link at the end of posts. This also fits our main goal of having THF be a reader friendly experience. We want folks to find what they need without much work. Also, both page views and links to our blog have increased this month. It’s tough to tell if the master link is helping there, but it seems like it. We’ll know better after doing this a few months in a row.
Why not give a master current event link a try at your blog, and see how it works for you? If you do try it out let me know if your traffic goes up, or tell me what sort of response you get to it.
Comments
Leave a Reply
