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Read it, comment, and share it with your friendsTip: Feature your best entries
I want to share some advice about something I think is a good idea for anyone who has been blogging for a while. I’m almost up to 200 entries here at my site and I don’t expect anyone to want to dig through my archives. That’s why I made a “featured posts” section (it’s in the navigation by the way) when I started working on this latest design. I think it’s great from a blog promotion point of view because for new visitors to my site, digging through monthly or category archives is not a good way to get a quick taste of what my blog is like, nor does it ensure that they will see the best entries. When it comes to blog promotion, take this idea:
99% of your blog’s worth is based on your 10 most popular entries.
This may sound crazy, but hear me out. I admit it’s not true for every blog, especially not for blogs where every entry is very similar, but I think for most blogs, especially personal blogs, this is right on target. For me it is definitely true, as the 10 most popular entries on my site make up almost all of my inbound links and new visitors.
Another thing to consider is that if you are telling someone about your blog in hopes of convincing them to visit your blog for the first time, you will most likely recommend your most popular entries to them. I would say something like,
“Yes, I have a website at christianmontoya.com, didn’t expect that url did you? I write a lot, and my site is doing well. I had a couple entries that were featured on digg, such as one about all-nighters and another about design trends, and I also had one that made it onto del.icio.us most popular about free graphic resources.”
Or maybe I would say that if I didn’t have a featured posts section. It’s quite wordy, and fortunately I do have a featured posts section, because I can just say:
“Yes, I have a website at christianmontoya.com, didn’t expect that url did you? I write a lot, and my site is doing well. If you want to see some of my best entries, you can just go to the featured posts section, it’s the third link in the navigation.”
One more reason why I recommend this page: I was contacted about a week ago about my all-nighters entry by a radio guy who was researching for a segment related to the topic. I guided him over the phone to find my entry again and find the related discussion on digg.com. Since I had my featured posts section, this was very easy, since all I had to do was tell him “if you go to featured posts, there’s a link to the original entry and another link to the site digg.com where people talked about it as well.” This was great since the guy I was helping had never been to digg before… I saved myself the trouble of having to help him search for the link.
The last reason for having a page like this is because it’s a big ego thing. To promote your blog you have to toot your own horn, so to speak, and this is a great way to do it. It’s basically saying, “look how popular/influential some of my entries have been.”
Some other sites that use this technique in various ways:
- Fast Company has a “most popular entries” section as rated by readers.
- Vitamin has a “favourite features” section on the article pages. The features are rated by the number of comments, which is a little unfair because older features have a better chance of a good rating. A voting system could be better.
- Stylegala has an “all stars” listing as well as a “top rated” listing for the gallery, which is very smart since gallery archives can be really large.
- Similar to Stylegala, I did a “Hall of Fame” section at Liquid Designs.
- And finally, this Wordpress plugin makes it very easy to show your most popular posts by views in your sidebar or on a separate page. Jason Clarke’s site is a good example of it.
I really like doing my featured posts section by hand, since it allows me total control over the appearance, allows me to use a lot of different criteria (inbound links, comments, and subject), and allows me to include related links of interest. If you are looking for a way to promote your blog and give new visitors a push in the right direction, I recommend this technique to you.
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Responses to my articleInteresting read, Christian, and I completely agree on what you say about a blog’s worth in relation to featured posts, but there are two things I would like to remark on.
First, a featured articles list can be a problem to some extent. Although I do not have any experience about this on my blog, I know what it means to present featured photos on my flickr-gallery in a set (and I’d call this an equivalent to your featured articles-list since you present your best work in one package): the rest stays untouched or unread.
You really can see how those images mentioned in my cream of the crop-set have higher and higher numbers of views while all the others stay at the same level. It is pretty difficult to get new images into this photo-set. So how about new articles in your featured articles list? Maybe featured articles are cool, but don’t they quash other articles?
The second thing is culture versus viewers. I am from the second smallest german speaking country in Europe (start guessing, guys!) and although everybody accepts if people show what they can do, there is always a bit of negative touch on presenting oneself this way. Sure, if you look at that in a pragmatical way, this is stupid, but I did not invent culture and it is like that. If you put some “advertisements” for your own articles on your own website, it looks as if you want to boast about that. It is much more “elegant” if reader come to your site and read specific articles, because others, to which you can link then, write about your articles. In this case, the judgement whether the article is really good or not does not come from you and everything is suddenly fine. I know it sounds stupid for people who are used to present themselves, but there are still others out there, who make a big mistake in doing this. I even once was asked whether I practice self-adulation with my homepage or what is it for in the end!
So how do I live with it? From time to time I write articles that include a lot of links to articles I wrote before. Either it is a nearly random collection of links, linked together by some crazy story or so or I write an article with a specific topic that lists all the other articles I wrote about the same topic. And my statistics show that if you publish an article like this, all the mentioned articles in it get higher view-numbers.
Very good points, Michael. On the first point, I guess it’s up to the publisher whether they want users to read a variety of entries or just the most popular ones. In my blog I’ve already assumed that no one would want to read old entries since I myself never do that on other blogs. My real goal is to get people to subscribe to my feed or bookmark my site so they get content as it is posted, so offering my most popular entries is a quick and easy way to do it.
For the second point, I probably should have mentioned that I was speaking in terms of the U.S.A. In the U.S., you have to assertively promote yourself. It’s very true that in many other countries this kind of behavior is looked down upon.
Linking to old posts is a great idea, and something a lot of bloggers could benefit from. I don’t do it much because my subjects are always changing, but I at least do it when I am posting an entry that belongs in a series of entries.
Completely agree. Though I like to keep featured posts on the front page, rather than lump them on their own page. One less click to the good stuff, right?
I manage mine by just making a seperate category (easy to view them all at once, then) and including a loop that only returns posts in that cat in the sidebar. Works well for me.
That’s a smart way to do it.
Great tip Christian. I’ve been doing this in some form or another for some time on my site. I elect three posts / pages with images to be displayed globaly throughout the site and also take the time to display popular posts in select areas. By doing this, I can guarantee that readers have a chance to click-through on posts which a) deserve attention, or b) could use a little more attention,
Love the post, Christian. I suspect you’re hitting on the unspoken truth that despite its low barrier to entry (or maybe because of it), blogging does not help with managing knowledge for posterity.
I’m still surprised to find published pages and posts without so much as a create and edit date (shhh, don’t look too close at my own site, I’m sure I’m just as guilty).
Now what we need is a good WP plugin to do what Thomas Silkjær’s new theme manager does - in addition to tag searching, allow easy sort and find based on date, rating and views (instead of #downloads).
Any volunteers?
Hi. The problem, I think, with the top10 posts is that people will keep on clicking on the same 10 popular entries, making it quite impossible to allow new posts to the enter the Top10. For that reason, I have slitely changed the plugin to give the 100 most read entries (I have written almost 400), on a special page (http://koztoujours.free.fr/index.php/le-classement-par-les-clics/ )
I also use wp-random-post, in order to bring back to life old posts, and wp-related-posts (at the end of each post)…
Yep, that’s the reason why I won’t use the plugin… after a while the “top 10″ would be way above any other entries and the list would never change. Maybe another way to modify it would be to make it drop any entries older than 6 months or a year, so it would be the “top 10 entries written in the last year” to keep things current. That’s such a great idea, actually, that I’m just sorry I don’t have time to implement it. Someone else should implement it and give me a mention
I think this is a great idea, I just may put a featured entries link on my blog. Now, where to start? And which ones to choose? Now that is the question.
I’ve been using wordpress pages to do just that calling that place my BlogoBox v.1.0 (as more featured posts get in there the version gets to increase, just joking
That’s because I found that if you wanted to list a lot of posts say 10 then you have to find some pretty good little spacing just for them and getting those crowded among my sidebar or any other region of the blog poked(getting it cluttered) on the structure and easy to get into atmosphere. Now I just provide the link to that very page(for propaganda purpose) and get to update it when I feel that a post deserves entering there 
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