Dusty Blog Archives - What To Do?
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I personaly visit blog archives quite a lot, and you’d be amazed by the number of quality posts that don’t have any comments (yet) … A lot of blogs have real gems in their archives, that recieves little or no visitors.
Browsing your own archives or other blogs archives can benefit you and your readers also!
Help Your Readers and Visitors
If you take some time to browse your own archives, you can find some really relevant posts you can link to in your newest blog posts! How cool is that? Those posts were written back when your blog had little or no traffic, so why not take ‘em out of the archives, bring those posts back to life, and make it easy for your visitors and readers to find them, by linking to those in your latest posts (if it’s relevant of course).
Help Yourself - Find Inspiration
Say you have some ideas, and want to write about this or that, but need this little “something” to get you going. Chances are you’ll find what you’re looking for browsing either your own archives or other blogs’ archives. And you can link to those posts in your latest posts, and, if you can, offer a relatively new opinion or approach.
Archives Are Boring
Yep archives are boring. But you can help make them more interesting by doing a couple of simple tweaks and changes. Use excerpts, make sure your headlines are interesting, and don’t forget that the “normal visitor” will check out your site for about 10 seconds or less, so if people take the time to look at your archives, please make it easy for them! Zakman from celebritybrands.net pointed out to me, that i had no search bar on smartwealthyrich, and you know what, i had completely forgot to put one! so i changed that! You can now find that search bar in the “archives” section in my sidebar.
Conclusion
Make your archives easy to read and scan through (people don’t read, they scan!). Link to your “less popular” posts more often, while, of course, making sure it’s relevant.
What else can you do to make your dusty archives more appealing? Tips and tricks welcome! :)
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22 Responses to “Dusty Blog Archives - What To Do?”
Discussion Area - Share Your Thoughts
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Its worth checking out the tumbleweed plugin from Yack Yack. I am using it on my blog and have started receiving comments on older posts
Hi Tara, i downloaded that plugin, but couldn’t figure why it wasn’t working, i’ll try that again, or send an ee-mail to Rob. :)
This is a very timely post for me. I’ve been thinking lately that my current archival system is quite obsolete. It’s in a calendar format and you can’t even read the whole post title. I’d much rather have one like yours. Is it easy to implement?
You’re right about the old posts never being seen. Some of my best writing was written in the early stages of the blog, probably the same scenario with most bloggers-as one usually starts an enterprise off with passion, enthusiasm, and an abundance of topics.
By the time you get readers it’s a little bit harder to come up with cool content. I bet the blog archives of the world hold a great stockpile of knowledge and wisdom, but they aren’t being explored because of our limited resources of time, coupled with a collective short attention span.
Could the secrets of life be hidden in the depths of blog archives? I’m going to take some more time to find out!
Hi Jesse, thanx for replying, welcome to SWR :)
“a collective short attention span” - i like the way you put that! the secrets of life could indeed be hidden in blog archives hehe
as for how to implement a nicer archive system the cutline wordpress theme (i’m a huge fan of cutline) makes it pretty easy to have good looking archives, it’s all right there included in the theme. I’m not sure, are you using wordpress? there is definitely a way to implement an archive system that is not calendar based, even if you’re not using wordpress, but it’d require some php knowledge. On the other hand having wordpress (with almost any theme) would make it easy to use excerpts and it’d display nice.
Lemme know if you find this useful, or if you’re using another CMS than wordpress.
Take care :)
Hello! I’m a blogger from Spain. I found your blog today and i add you to my favourites. Your blog it’s very interesting and useful. I start to link at related posts of my archive in my new posts a few weeks ago, and my traffic of page visits go up. Regards. Ciao ;)
Ivan, welcome to SWR, thanx for replying!
Linking to related posts, either your own posts or other peoples’ posts is a sure way to help people find the older posts, and also get ssome attention from other bloggers!
Glad you liked my blog! take care! :)
I recommend posting links to your tags in the sidebar, which you have done. There have been many times when I’ve found an interesting blog and wanted to see all of the posts on a particular topic!
Good afternoon, Jonathan! ;)
Hello Tish! ;)
tags in the sidebar is definitely a good way to help people find what they’re looking for. Especially when a bblog focusses of a certain number of “topics”.
Nice to see you on here Tish! Take Care!
It’s definitely worth revisiting your archives on a fairly regular basis. Not only do they provide inspiration, but you can also link to them within your newer articles giving them new exposure.
I also keep a ‘Top Posts’ section in my blog to keep the real gems from getting buried in the archives.
- Martin Reed
Hey Martin, totally, inspiration comes many different ways, and browsing archives is one of the ways :)
a top posts section helps a bunch, one thing i foudn is that depending on what plugin you use to diplay your top posts, you can either set it to display the ones that have the most comments or the ones that have been visited more. Of course if a post has not a lot of comments it won’t show up, but well you can always create a new section in the sidebar and include something like “check those posts out” or “worth reading” or something like that! :)
Archives are like bundled up old newspapers. Collectively, they have little or no value - or so we assume.
But it’s my experience that, say, I’m at a bus-stop waiting for the bus (obviously) and I find a 10-day old newspaper that someone left on the bench.
I pick it up because it’s something to do while waiting…. and guess what, I invariably see a very interesting article or news item. And I tell myself, “HOW did I miss reading about this???”
Commercialiasm has entered our lives so deeply and with such an impact that we blindly draw conclusions like “old has no value.”
I agree with Jon there — there’s a lot of wisdom in them archives just waiting to be picked up.
Hey RK! we too often assume that “old” stuff is “too old to be considered useful”, it’s sad cause there’s a lot of material (if we’re talking about newspapers and blogs) that are extremely relevant today even if wrote a year ago, sometimes there are timeless classics.
Feed readers are awesome for the same reasons you mentionned in your reply - “how did i miss reading about this?” - Netvibes to the rescue, ladies and gentlemen! :)
There is a “Must Reads” section in my sidebar where I put the best of the archives for first time and regular visitors to check out. It certainly works because I get comments on them all the time!
Hey Ilker, are you using a “popular post” plugin thing, or you selected some posts and put them up there?
by the way, thanx for stopping by! make yourself at home! :)
The problem lies in the fact that as we get more readers we lose focus of our original objectives. We see what drew attention in the first place and then follow that, even unconsciously. I have figured out a way to make archived posts relevant again.
Okay, so I’m letting the cat out of the bag earlier than I anticipated, but it basically it’s the same thing that newspapers have been doing for years. Focus new posts as follow-ups and mentions to posts from exactly 2 years ago, 1 year ago, 1 month ago, etc. This is what I plan to do starting on May 27, my 1-year anniversary and my welcome message. I can’t guarantee you can strike a gold mine this way, but you can at least examine, update, and freshen the archives on a continual basis.
Hey RT, that’s a great idea, you’re right newspapers and magazines have been doing that for years. It sounds like a really good way to: 1- find topics and 2- get the dusty posts out of the archives.
:)
Hey Jonathan - to get around your concerns with the ‘Top Posts’ section I mentioned; I actually do this manually by hand each month.
Yes, shock horror! We do seem to be overly reliant on plugins these days, when a lot of the time something can be done effectively (and better) manually.
I review what I consider to be my best posts of the month and manually pop them up on my ‘Top Posts’ page.
It takes less than half an hour at the end of each month, and saves what I consider my best work from being hidden under a mound of Internet dust!
- Martin Reed
Hey Martin, yeah we’re definitely too reliant on plugins, i don’t use much plugins, don’t have sidebar widgets, or anything, i put the code in the PHP file, i had fun and learned way more than if i was using automattic siddebar widgets :)
Good idea to “hand-select” posts, i might do this too, so this way the top posts would also be the most relevant ones.
We don’t have a huge archive yet as we are barely a month old, but as it grows we are trying to make sure we link to an older post from a new one whenever the information is relevant. As also use the related post plugin to give exposure to our older posts.
Hey Jason, welcome to SWR, please make yourself at home! :)
Not having a huge archive is not a bad thing, it’s all about relevancy anyway. linking to older posts (and always keeping linking to them in the future) can only be a good thing. The related post plug-in is also a very nice thing to have, i’ve yet to install it on my blog, but planned on doing so next week!
Thanx for stopping by Jason! (great blog by the way, i’ll be reading more of it for sure)
I recommend the Similar Posts plugin instead of the related posts plugin. There’s also a Similar Posts Feed plugin that complements it (it shows up in my feeds).
http://rmarsh.com/plugins/similar-posts/
http://rmarsh.com/plugins/similar-posts-feed/
Hey RT, thanx a bunch for the links, i’ll install those begining of next week! :)