Blog Architecture: The reason I’m ignoring your blog

I browse through 100 blogs a day. I subscribe to 51. That means that when I read your blog I forget about it. It’s your fault. You haven’t proved to me that you’re providing valuable content on a regular basis.Making the front page of Digg is great for your page views but how often does it provide a significant jump in the number of people subscribing to your blog? Making the front page of these social news sites is worthless if you don’t have a way to show new visitors what your best content is.

The reasons I ignore most blogs are:

• It’s hard for me to find your best posts. I came to your blog because you wrote something interesting and someone linked to it. Prove to me you have done it before and I’m more likely to come back. Put a related posts plugin on your single post pages so that when someone clicks through they can say “Oh look, this guy wrote about the same topic a few times…maybe I should read those posts too.”
• The only way to browse your blog is by date and category. This goes back to the first reason. You know what your best posts are…list them! I want to see the best content a blog has to offer the first time I visit it. Make it easy for people to find the best posts you’ve ever written.
• Your sidebar is full of “junk.” Widgets are nice. Not all widgets are nice. Stop adding every widget under the sun to your sidebar - the more you add the less useful they become.
• Your design looks like everyone elses. Not everyone is a great designer, but at least put some effort into customizing your blog if you want to be taken seriously. You don’t have to do anything really fancy, but simply activating a new theme is not “customizing” your blog.
• Your more worried about traffic than content. Traffic follows good content. Stop writing posts in an effort to make the front page of Digg. It’s obvious to everyone what you’re doing.

The solution: Intelligent Blog Architecture

The solution to the navigation problem is relatively simple. There are plenty of plugins that will list the most popular posts on your blog. I use one in the footer of my blog called Popularity Contest by Alex King. Like most WordPress plugins, it’s a breeze to setup. My pageviews increased significantly and it’s a nice way of looking at which posts are most popular.

Hardcode a list of your personal favorite posts into your footer or single pages. Chris Pearson does a nice job of highlighting which posts he thinks are the “best” on his blog. This lets people see posts that are otherwise lost in the archives of your blog. You know which posts you spend the most time on, it’s okay to list those posts and show off a little bit.

Add a list of related posts to the single pages on your blog. Once again this is as easy as installing a plugin and activating it (I use this one if the link still works). This helps a lot when your make the front page of a social news site - it allows people to see a list of posts that are similar to the one that they’re obviously interested in.

Make your sidebar useful to your readers. If you load your sidebar with a bunch of useless shit then the entire sidebar becomes useless. Do you really need an icon for every social bookmarking site imagineable? Do you really need an email subscription box? Some people will answer yes - and that’s okay - just make sure the sidebar is full of things the majority of your visitors actually use. I removed email subscriptions because something like 0.5% of my subscribers actually used it.

The best advice I can give you is to look at your blog as a first time visitor would. What posts would you want to read? What information would you want to have easy access to? If that information isn’t already visible, make it obvious and easy to find.