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Saturday, 14 March 2009

Day 15 - Make Your Most Popular Posts Sticky

Today's challenge has made me look at blogging from a different perspective - my readers' perspective.

When we write a blog post, we take too much for granted. We believe that the readers know everything we know. We suppose that our readers know us, that they have read every single post we have written. 

What we should ask ourselves is a very simple question: Is this the way we read other people's blogs? Once you think about how you behave on the Internet - not as a writer, but as a reader, you begin to understand that you have to do everything you can to make your reader's life as easy as possible. 

Today's task was relatively simple - to add a "Subscribe to this post via RSS or via email" link directly to my most popular posts. The idea is not simply to make my readers subscribe, but rather to save them a lot of time if subscribing is what they want - instead of searching the sidebar, they simply click on the link at the bottom of the post.

I write on Fridays. Or on Saturdays. Which is OK if I am working on a long complicated post with a lot of links like I did last week. On the other hand, writing about how I stickified my posts (love the word) shouldn't take long, should it? Yes, but the actual process of stickifying (I do love this word) is what takes time. It is similar to interlinking. You have to go all the way back and add the RSS link to your old posts.

In his video Darren suggests that you should add the Subscribe link to the posts that are attracting more readers than others. By now I have become good friends with my Google Analytics tool. It gives me confidence to know that there are a few people out there who are reading this. I know which posts are being read more than others. And I know which posts have attracted comments. Still, I added the "If you like this blog you can subscribe to it via RSS or via email" link to the bottom of every single post (maybe I skipped a few by accident, but I'll get there). To be on the safe side. And to make your life really easy.


If you like this blog, you can subscribe to it via RSS or via email. 

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3 comments:

  1. Sue Waters16 March 2009 at 05:16

    Hi Natasa, like the idea of including subscribe by email as well as by RSS. But noticed that your link for email needs to be adjusted. At the moment it is linking to your RSS feed and not to your email information.

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  2. Natasa17 March 2009 at 01:08

    Hi Sue,
    Thanks for pointing that out to me. I am going to adjust the email link. I have already done it in some of my new posts, now I just need to keep going back.

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  3. KALINAGO ENGLISH22 March 2009 at 20:11

    ;-) Thanks for the reminder! I always forget to do this although I do have an automatic bookmark thing on each posting.

    Karenne

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