Poliblog Perspective

I came across a comment on Problogger that is one of the best summaries I have seen of things you can do to make your blog “sticky” - i.e., helping visitors find other articles of interest, and encouraging them to stay. His tips are a balance of common sense, marketing nouse and a varied bag of tricks.

This is a good approach whether you are attempting to put your views across to your reader, or encouraging them to stay and view more adverts.

It is from Ross Hill, a student who runs an “Interview” blog called Hatchthat.

Since I cannot improve it, I’ve quoted the comment directly. Here are Ross’s 17 Tips to make your blog “sticky”, followed by my reflections.

17 Tips to Make Your Blog Sticky

1. Show a popular articles list, people will see at least your top headlines and hopefully click through to read them.
2. Show a recent articles list, make sure they are different to the popular articles list and are all still interesting headlines.
3. Only show dates if you post often enough.
4. Only show subscriber counts if you have enough to brag about.
5. Post about upcoming content, but not too often.
6. Prompt them to subscribe so that they don’t miss out, immediately after you mention something upcoming.
7. Run a series of posts on a topic, linking to previous ones but also showing how many more are to come and what topics they will be on.
8. Make sure every piece of the page represents value, they want to see signal not noise. Don’t post those link roundups until you have enough to make it a proper resource list.
9. Make sure you have lots of comments on your posts. If you don’t have comments you either need to promote commenting or post less so that the comments pile up on your most recent posts.
10. If you have a multi-author blog show each authors recent popular posts so the visitor knows what to expect from each person.
11. Show third party endorsements such as blog network badges, sponsor links and mybloglog recent avatars. Mention it when a popular industry blog links to you, but not too often.
12. Have a great template design, nicer blogs generally have nicer content. If it has a tight design like the A-listers you can most likely fool a few people.
13. Have an about page that paints a good picture of you and promotes interest in not only what you have done but what you are working on next. Give them a photo of you so they know who is actually writing.
14. Order your archives by interestingness, not just date or alphabetical category.
15. Add value in absolutely every post, don’t report what other people are posting because a visitor can just go straight to the source instead.
16. Have recurring themes and mention them clearly either at the end of a post or somewhere in the menu. The same applies for categories, but make sure your categories reflect your content as a whole and remember to kill off categories that don’t.
17. Keep it focussed and on-topic. If you have a blogroll make sure you only link to sites that are relevant to the blogs topic.

My Comments

Since I started the Wardman Wire in March 2007, I have considered most of these, and implemented quite a number.

If there is one thing that has come to be the key feature of the blog, it is probably series of related posts - of which there are now more than 50.

In the current phase of the blog’s development, the most important feature is weekly columns by writers on particular topics, which I see as a way of maintaining quality while still keeping up regular postings.

The next thing I am looking at is making it easier for readers to find some of the best articles from early in the life of the blog.

To comment on two of Ross’s points:

• There can be value in going off-topic occasionally - and sometimes deliberately, as it will encourage visitors from outside your particular “silo” - which exposes your writing to a new audience. For political bloggers, engagement with political opponents is valuable for debating policy, and also to maintain a healthy political dialogue as a whole.
• For political blogs, I don’t believe in removing dates from postings, as our content is so context dependent.
• I do, however, strongly believe in making older content accessible - which is a notoriously weak point on many UK political blogs.

Wrapping Up

Thank-you Ross.

Tags: ross hill, blog tips, make it sticky, keep visitors, to blogging tips, political blog tips

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