3 Ideas To Im­prove Your Blog

I’ve made a few im­prove­ments to my blog over the week­end, and I share them with you so you can get ideas for im­prov­ing your own blog.

1. Re­move clut­ter from your blog.

Be­fore blogs be­came pop­u­lar most web sites were pretty fo­cused. With the rise of con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems all kinds of un­nec­es­sary stuff started to clut­ter web sites.

Clut­ter comes in 2 forms:

• Unim­por­tant meta information
• Unim­por­tant widgets

2 real life ex­am­ples for blog clutter

Un­til to­day my blog had 2 use­less pieces of meta info.

a) The blog post ti­tles were pre­ceded by the date.

The date is pretty use­less for read­ing the ar­ti­cle, es­pe­cially given that the year was not in­cluded. So you couldn’t even fig­ure out whether the post was from this year or 10 years old.

Re­mov­ing the pub­­lish-date makes it eas­ier for read­ers, and it moves the con­tent up.

Be­fore

Af­ter

b) There was a click­able cat­e­gory link be­low every article.

Why was it use­less? Be­cause my blog has only one cat­e­gory. So the cat­e­gory link gave read­ers the same con­tent that the Blog page al­ready presents.

Be­fore

Af­ter

Re­mov­ing this un­nec­es­sary link

• Pre­vents the reader from clicks with frus­trat­ing results.
• Frees at­ten­tion for the ac­tual content.

Con­sider a big clean-up for your blog and rig­or­ously re­move every­thing that does not serve a clear purpose.

Clut­ter is bad!

• Un­nec­es­sary items make it harder for read­ers to quickly ‘get’ the im­por­tant parts of your page.
• A clut­tered pages is vi­su­ally less attractive. 
• It dis­tracts read­ers from the ac­tions you want them to take. I.e. from your mar­ket­ing goals.

The 2 ex­am­ples above re­quired edit­ing the Word­Press theme, which is not doable for most peo­ple. It’s quite easy, how­ever, to find some­one on Free­lancer sites or fo­rums who can make these changes in minutes.

Of­ten clut­ter can be re­moved through easy-to-use theme set­tings, and through re­mov­ing use­less wid­gets by go­ing to “Ap­pear­ance – Wid­gets” in your Word­Press dashboard.

It’s as easy as drag and drop.

2. En­hance your blog comments.

Com­ments are the most fun as­pect of blog­ging. But the rise of so­cial me­dia and the rise of spam­mers makes it harder to build a com­ment­ing com­mu­nity on your blog.

Many peo­ple will com­ment on Google Plus or Face­book or Pin­ter­est in­stead of writ­ing on your blog. Like many things blog com­ment­ing is get­ting more and more fragmented.

Jim Con­nolly, one of my fa­vorite blog­gers, took it to the ex­treme by com­pletely dis­abling blog com­ments and send­ing read­ers to so­cial me­dia sites for commenting.

One the other end of the spec­trum is Mark W. Schae­fer who en­joys an awe­some com­mu­nity of com­menters on his blog, de­spite Face­book & Co.

I’m go­ing the Schae­fer-way, at least for com­ments, and hope one day my blog com­mu­nity is just as busy and enthusiastic.

There are nu­mer­ous ways to en­hance the blog com­ment sec­tion of your blog.

1. You could in­te­grate com­ment sys­tems from so­cial me­dia sites like Face­book or Google Plus.
2. You could add a com­ment no­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tems that emails com­menters when fol­low-up com­ments are published.
3. You could add fea­tures that re­ward com­menters with do-fol­low links and ad­di­tional goodies.

Be­ware that each “en­hance­ment” can also in­crease com­plex­ity for your read­ers and for your­self. That’s why I kept my up­date simple.

For now I avoid in­te­grat­ing ex­ter­nal com­ment sys­tems. I rather have as much con­ver­sa­tion as pos­si­ble on my blog.

I in­stalled the free ver­sion of the pop­u­lar Com­mentLuv plu­gin.

Then I ad­justed the set­tings to re­move as much plu­gin clut­ter as pos­si­ble. For ex­am­ple I re­moved the Com­mentLuv logo, and pro­vided a clearer de­scrip­tion next to the Com­mentLuv checkbox.

What does it do?

Com­mentLuv looks up the blog of every com­menter and al­lows you to add one of your blog posts to your comment.

Why do I like the idea?

1. It’s a great re­ward for com­menters, be­cause the chance that a reader clicks an ac­tual post ti­tle is higher than click­ing the blog link that’s at­tached to the commenter’s name.
2. It’s in­ter­est­ing for me and for read­ers, be­cause see­ing the post ti­tle gives you an im­me­di­ate idea what the com­menter is writ­ing about.

3. Keep read­ers on your blog by adding dif­fer­ent ways for con­tent discovery.

Many read­ers will read or skim one post and, even if they like it, click away to other web sites.

You goal, how­ever, is to keep read­ers on your site. That’s why I added 3 ways to dis­cover more blog posts to my sidebar.

1. So­cial­Met­ric­sPro dis­plays the most shared posts. It in­cludes post thumbnails.
2. The na­tive Word­Press lat­est post wid­get shows the newest posts.
3. The Bet­ter Word­Press Re­cent Com­ments plu­gin shows the lat­est com­ments and a pic of the commenter.

 

I don’t know yet, whether this change will have the de­sired ef­fect. I will find out in a few weeks when check­ing if the av­er­age num­ber of pages viewed per reader has increased.

Other pop­u­lar meth­ods to help read­ers dis­cover con­tent are hover pop­ups pre­sent­ing post top­ics, of­ten com­bined with info from so­cial me­dia. For ex­am­ple: “Your friend John Doe like post XYZ on Facebook.”

Since, as a reader of other blogs, I hate those hover pop­ups get­ting in my way when read­ing, I de­cided to not use them.

Now it’s your turn.

If you want to im­prove your blog con­sider these 3 options:

1. Re­move clutter.
2. En­hance commenting.
3. Fa­cil­i­tate con­tent discovery.