The Power of Collections in Generating Blog Traffic: by Trevor Thorn
Image from Lent, Holy Week and Easter Collection
In most of my recent posts to this blog, I
have tried to pass on information about my own five-and-a-half years of
blogging experience and to highlight some of the simpler ways I have discovered
to attract viewings to the site. Here, I describe briefly the way in which
‘Collections’ can be helpful. I describe how I use them on ‘Blogger’ and assume there is a parallel sytem on ‘Wordpress’ (although Wordpress users will have to
explore).
It is fairly simple. I use a ‘Page’ in the
Blogger ‘New Post’ side menu to create an index of posts with a common theme.
Each item listed has a hyperlink to the post itself. Then every original post
refers back to this index with a simple final line ‘If you have enjoyed this,
you may also enjoy my other poems with an Easter
theme (for example). Click here to see the complete Easter collection.’ To some degree, the same can be achieved
through tags – but the advantages are that the Pages menu will record the
number of hits to that specifically and by using pages, there is the
opportunity to describe each item in a collection to steer readers more swiftly
to what might particularly be of interest to them. It seems to work.
Let me give you a tangible example. I am
currently working on a project of Assembly
Friendly and All-Age songs about
God and Science. That, then is
a heading which appears in the top right of my Home page. By Clicking-through,
you would get displayed in the left hand column the following (which is the
content of the ‘page’ used for this collection).
‘SONGS OF GOD & SCIENCE (Assembly
Friendly)
More will be added to this selection in Spring
2017.’
(NEW in this context means newly posted within the
last two months)
Each Title then leads to
the song and each song at the end has a click-through which returns to this
index.
Obviously this is a
fairly specialist ‘collection’ but among my others are
Lent, Holy Week and
Easter
Christmas
Care of The Planet
Poems of Beauty, Science
and Faith/ Wonders of Creation
There are other ways of
gathering items with a common theme but the beauty of using ‘pages’ in this way
is that each hit registers on the page so can be compared with the number of
hits for each individual posting.
On my blog, the outcome
of using this basis looks like this
Assembly Friendly/ All Age 1303 hits
(started late last year)
Lent – Easter 3006 hits (Started 3 years ago)
Christmas 1814 hits (started 2
years ago)
Care of The Planet 311 hits (started
1 year ago)
Beauty, Science & faith 1463 hits (started 1.5 years ago)
So these account for
7500 of the viewings on my blog and many of these will have lead to a second viewing
of the song/ poem itself. I leave
you to think how useful this could be to you if you have not already taken this
path and hope it is an idea that is helpful to some.
To go straight from here
to concrete examples
This is a useful post, Trevor. I use pages on WordPress to set up contents/index and for the posts from blogging challenges. Clicking on the category of a post brings up the archive for that category and WordPress generates related posts (3) if the blogger has set up that facility. Sue
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