I think the autoresponder tip alone is gold. I always teach people to re-use their content on their blog in their newsletters etc, but keeping the old content fresh in an autoresponder series just leverages that content so much further.
I've heard that not putting the date in the post title can make it harder for Wordpress to locate articles when the database is being searched etc. I've also heard that there is a greater risk of having similar-titled posts cause a delay in finding the right post to display. I'd to know if there's any truth to that...
James
Charles Crawford
· 8 months ago
Thank you for these excellent tips. My blog is in its early stage and I'm concerned about building traffic and populating my email list.
I'm focusing on adding good content, but I still need to increase my readership beyond friends and family.
Your advice on autoresponders and recycling posts really opened my eyes.
Anita Ashland
· 8 months ago
Excellent post. I do a compromise with blog post dates. The dates appear on the posts on the home page but once it falls off the home page and hits the archives the dates are automatically removed. That way the current posts look fresh and the old posts don't look dated.
Michel Fortin
· 8 months ago
@James Watson - I don't think not having any dates would slow searches down because posts are stored according to their post ID. Pretty permalinks are redirects, not actually stored. As for similar titled posts, that's a non-issue because WordPress identifies dupes and renames slugs accordingly.
James Watson
· 8 months ago
Michel,
If you enter or click on a post URL then doesn't Wordpress try to find a match for that URL in the database? So, at that stage I assume it doesn't have a post ID to refer to
Denis de Bernardy on the Semiologic Forum writes: "If you have two posts with the same title at different dates, WordPress can start having all sorts of weird issues. Specifically, it may end up doing two or more round trips to your DB server before identifying what your visitor is expecting to see. And this can hog a server's resources quite extensively.
Adding a date or a post id in there fixes both issues: Your post urls no longer look like those of your static pages, and WordPress has a criteria that allows you to narrow down the user's request to a single post in one query."
So perhaps the best, simple permalink structure would be %id%/%postname% ?
I'm trying to decide on the strategy I'm going to use going forward, perhaps that will be the one for me now.
Imee
· 8 months ago
Cool tips, very doable, especially for those who use their blogs to earn profit. Although I wouldn't hire a freelance publicist. That would be, well, another expense to pay. If you have the extra money, then by all means. I personally preferred to learn SEO and do the publicizing myself.
Michel Fortin
· 8 months ago
@James Watson - About the clicking on blog post links, again, those are redirects. They are not database/search driven. I'm no WordPress expert, but in my tests permanlinks with domain name and post name only have given me the best results -- especially in terms of SEO.
With all due respect to Denis, I believe this may have been an issue with an older version of WordPress. Because now, with the latest version, when you post a new article with a same title, it automatically adds "2" at the end (the number depends on how many blog post titles that are dupes).
I tend to remove those and change the slug manually anyway to make the title different.
Again, I think that dupes are a non-issue with the latest version of WordPress. Plus, there are plugins that help, too, such as SEO Slugs and No Dupes (something like that). I use the former, which removes extraneous words in the slug so that the title is optimized for SEO when you post.
Some of the top A-list bloggers and SEO experts recommend that it'd be only %postname%, which is what I use and it works well for me.
Cathy Goodwin
· 8 months ago
Great ideas, especially for people who just don't have time to post every day. I'm a little confused about autoresponders and broadcasts: do you ask visitors to join a list that works with your autoresponder service (such as AWeber or 1shoppingcart) ?
Lynn Lane
· 8 months ago
Michel,
As always some great information to help me on my way. Thanks for the Success Tips Today
very nice article. I've needed something like this long ago. Thanks
Frederico Vila Verde
· 8 months ago
Michel,
Very GOOD post...
Especially:
a) The tip on not using dates b) And the way you leverage the autoresponder efforts
Loved it! Thanks!
Frederico Vila Verde
Michel Fortin
· 8 months ago
@Cathy Goodwin - Yes, precisely. I use GetResponse.com. The check box in the comment form below adds you to that list. You can stay subscribed to see how I do it, but every message has an unsub link.
Hope this helps.
Lorraine Grula
· 8 months ago
Thanks Michael.
That was an extremely helpful article.
Personally, I would rather see someone post one extremely good article a week than 5 or 6 not-so-great articles. I get the impression from some pro-blogger types that although they SAY quality content is paramount, they actually operate in a way that shows they are more concerned with impressing search engines with their frequency.
I also appreciate the fact that this article makes it quite plain that a blog is NOT going to be your main source of income. Many pro-blogger types distort that fact, which I have painfully found out to be true the hard way.
Thanks for your straight forward information.
Lorraine
Ian Brodie
· 8 months ago
Tip #4 on autoresponders is fantastic! Probably the first time in a year I've seen an idea on "growing your blog readership" that was really new for me.
Thanks Michel
Ian
Greg Thompson
· 8 months ago
Michel,
What are you using to display that big "# Comments" thing in the upper right of each post? I've been wondering about that for a long time. Is it custom code or some plugin you have or what?
--Greg
Michel Fortin
· 8 months ago
@Greg Thompson - That's designed by little ol' me. I just use the the_comments tag native to wordpress (which lists how many comments a post has), and I styled it with CSS and the background is simple photoshop (although there are tons of stock icons all over the web).
Michel Fortin
· 8 months ago
@Greg Thompson - The tag is comments_popup_link. I just make sure to wrap it with a div and span tags. Here's the actual code...
I noticed that you weren't showing the dates of your post for a while, and wondering... it's a good thing.
However, I think "backwards" since I don't know if the post is out of date or note. It's a good thing to say that you update them, now I know.
Maybe you should add a line in your autoresponder message that indicate that the post is brand new for 2009 or something like that.
Why?
Because whenever I read a blog post, I expect the content to be from this week.
It may be just me.
Awesome tips.
Thanks, Franck the Body Guard Marketer
Michel Fortin
· 8 months ago
@Franck Silvestre - And that is why I, precisely, say "I just posted a new post" versus "I just updated a blog post" in my messages.
Jack Humphrey
· 8 months ago
Excellent post man! This post should be responsible for millions of new visitors for all of your readers in the next month. All they have to do is implement!
AndyBeard
· 8 months ago
Here is something to take it up just one notch, that my friend Tim Nash put together
1. It will remove the date from older post, such as you have still appearing below the tags 2. Removing dates from comments thus avoiding tons of comments referring to a post as being old.
It would probably be possible to add some extra logic to it, such that it doesn't remove the date on items which you might not consider evergreen, or were current news when posts, but now dated.
In addition it works on post_date so you would need to use some kind of "features" method to display reinvigorated posts on the front page - changing the date to refresh post order would make the times reappear. Not ideal. Possibly better would be to add a new date field for when something was first published, which never changes, and control display of dates based upon that.
Will have to give Tim a nudge
Justin Harris
· 8 months ago
Great article. I love the ideas on recycling blog posts.
I would love to see more information on how you use the spreadsheet to organize your content. I never would have thought to use a spreadsheet to organize articles and blog content.
Justin
Terrance Charles
· 8 months ago
Great post Michel. I've been concentrating on these with my blog too. I like where you said, don't date your post, I came across thinking about that the other day because sometimes you have post that are good, but didn't get enough exposure but the date on it may make it look bad if you bring it back to light. I'm going to take my dates off too and see how that works, thanks for the advice.
Great blog as usual. I would like to know more about basics of writing. I love to write but my skills are very basic. Can you suggest something please?
Regards Amarjit
dawnaurora
· 8 months ago
Great post. I have been doing a lot of blog tweaking lately and these tips will help out even further. Thank you.
Ryan Bessling
· 8 months ago
Michel, thank you for filling us in on how you make the most out of your blog so that we can make the same changes to our blogs.
I have been wondering why you never posted the dates on your blog but now it makes sense.
I like the fact that you gave the links to the script that you use to add the important features to your blog.
Great post, as usual. I often retweet Twitwall blog updates via Twitter, as many people miss the update the first time.
Peter - Software Marketing Sec
· 8 months ago
Excellent content as usual!
I have had my eyes on your blog for years and implemented some of your ideas continually on my own blogs.
What time do you feel is appropriate to push the same (slightly re-freshened) article to your list?
Thanks again, Peter
Carol Bremner
· 7 months ago
Thanks so much for those great tips, especially the ones about the spreadsheet and the autoresponder. I just have one question re the autoresponder. Do you update an old post and re-post it on your blog so that it's sent as a blog update, or do you place it in your autoresponder to be sent out to your list in a pre-determined time sequence? Carol
Michel Fortin
· 7 months ago
@Carol Bremner - I send my broadcasts manually. So no, I don't repost them. I simply update them and send a broadcast to my list. After I send a broadcast email about the update, I then place it at the end of the autoresponder queue. That way, future subscribers will eventually get the same update, too.
I have used number 4 for so long that my auto responder pre-populated for almost a year ahead. I think the biggest problem now is to go through and remove those emails that point to posts that are time dependent.
that was big mistake for me in the begging - sending people to posts that relied on information delivered at one point in time and no longer valid or outdated.
1) Either hire a freelancer to pull out a list of all those posts, in which order they're in, and you visit them one by one, over time, to update them or "genericise" them (or remove them altogether), or...
2) Subscribe to your own list. And keep an eye out for those outdated ones. When you get one that needs updating, you update it and broadcast to your list (no need to add it to your cycle because it's already there).
Again, I keep a spreadsheet of all my posts, and I have them listed by category, and the columns next to it indicates: a) updated? b) broadcasted? c) Tweeted? d) added to AR cycle?
I then color-code the background of the cells to indicate "green" (evergreen), "yellow" (evergreen but has broken/outdated links only), "orange" (needs updating), and "red" (cannot be evergreen at all, especially is tied to a current event, newspiece, or trend).
Hope this helps.
Justin Hitt
· 7 months ago
@Michel Fortin - Adding your regular posts to the end of your autoresponder is an excellent tip, later you can cull out those that don't produce. Either way your readers get regular content (and value.) I face Alex's problem with such a backlog, will put this on my list of things for a virtual assistant to do.
Bill Vlasak[olderthandirt101][
· 7 months ago
@Anita Ashland - Do you manually remove the dates from the posts that are to be archived?
Bill Vlasak[olderthandirt101][
· 7 months ago
Great tips ,especially with using an autoresponder. Since you can use dhtml in your posts could you not hide the dates using 'visibility hidden' but searching would not be confused with duplicate blog article names and only ,at most ,bring up more than one query response ?
Clare Swindlehurst
· 7 months ago
Thanks for the great tips Michel. I like @Carol Bremner saw a light bulb when you spoke about using your autoresponder and broadcasts to drive traffic. I'm going to sit down today and work that into my blog schedule. Clare
Solomon Huey
· 7 months ago
Great info, I'll definitely try applying these concepts into my own blogging efforts. I'm not really into monetizing my blog directly either, so this really works well with how I'm applying blogging to my business. :)
Hans Kristian Anderson
· 7 months ago
Great tips for driving traffic to our blogs. I never thought that it might be beneficial to not have a date on our blog posts, thanks.
Business Blog
· 7 months ago
Thank you for these tips - they all help as I build and develope my own blogs
J.Lamar Ferren
· 7 months ago
This is some very valuable insight on growing blogs. Thanks Michael!
parenting tips
· 7 months ago
Consistency in blogs earn the trust and eventually the loyalty of readers.
Michel Fortin
· 7 months ago
Here's a comment on another blog post on the subject of recycling older blog posts, that's relevant to this discussion:
Thank you for the update on this post and I love to read you blog and keep coming back!
Funny Pictures
· 6 months ago
wow...great tips, thanks for sharing it would be very helpful to enhance our blog.
James Jacobson
· 5 months ago
Very good post. One question: How frequently do you send to your Auto Responder list (not broadcasts) but AR content?
Michel Fortin
· 5 months ago
I send out one email every other day. They alternate between a content (blog update) and an offer.
Burton Kent
· 4 months ago
What exactly do you recommend? Slide up popups or lightbox? Your post suggests slide-ups, but what I saw was a lightbox.
Seems like you're still testing thingshere and here.
B
ramgunjal
· 3 months ago
Nice post and great article. Very powerful idea to monetize any blog with good SERP. It will be pleasure if you add some handy tips to increase backlinks rapidly. Thanks,
AskJamesHolmes
· 3 months ago
Michel -
Great tips and I love #4 integrating the autoresponder! Never thought of that and I think the idea of NOT dating your post allows you to seamlessly go back and update or rewrite and then when the recipient on your email update visits the post it doesn't feel stale to them, i.e., you have routed them to an "old"posting. It is a perception issue.
These are actionable tips that many of which will pay off big over time if one does them with consistency, there is a cumulative effect that will be measured over time.
Thank you!
James
Chris
· 1 month ago
I cannot believe that I am the only one who finds the email optin popup annoying after the first visit. It is a simple technical matter to set a cookie so I am not continually pounded with the form even though I have signed up for your email list.
Lest I sound like all sour grapes, let me take the opportunity to commend you on your quality content and catchy email subjects. Your emails consistently catch my attention.
All Comments
I think the autoresponder tip alone is gold. I always teach people to re-use their content on their blog in their newsletters etc, but keeping the old content fresh in an autoresponder series just leverages that content so much further.
I've heard that not putting the date in the post title can make it harder for Wordpress to locate articles when the database is being searched etc. I've also heard that there is a greater risk of having similar-titled posts cause a delay in finding the right post to display. I'd to know if there's any truth to that...
James
I'm focusing on adding good content, but I still need to increase my readership beyond friends and family.
Your advice on autoresponders and recycling posts really opened my eyes.
If you enter or click on a post URL then doesn't Wordpress try to find a match for that URL in the database? So, at that stage I assume it doesn't have a post ID to refer to
Denis de Bernardy on the Semiologic Forum writes:
"If you have two posts with the same title at different dates, WordPress can start having all sorts of weird issues. Specifically, it may end up doing two or more round trips to your DB server before identifying what your visitor is expecting to see. And this can hog a server's resources quite extensively.
Adding a date or a post id in there fixes both issues: Your post urls no longer look like those of your static pages, and WordPress has a criteria that allows you to narrow down the user's request to a single post in one query."
So perhaps the best, simple permalink structure would be %id%/%postname% ?
I'm trying to decide on the strategy I'm going to use going forward, perhaps that will be the one for me now.
With all due respect to Denis, I believe this may have been an issue with an older version of WordPress. Because now, with the latest version, when you post a new article with a same title, it automatically adds "2" at the end (the number depends on how many blog post titles that are dupes).
I tend to remove those and change the slug manually anyway to make the title different.
Again, I think that dupes are a non-issue with the latest version of WordPress. Plus, there are plugins that help, too, such as SEO Slugs and No Dupes (something like that). I use the former, which removes extraneous words in the slug so that the title is optimized for SEO when you post.
Some of the top A-list bloggers and SEO experts recommend that it'd be only %postname%, which is what I use and it works well for me.
As always some great information to help me on my way.
Thanks for the Success Tips Today
Lynn Lane
Success Strategies For Life
Success Today
Very GOOD post...
Especially:
a) The tip on not using dates
b) And the way you leverage the autoresponder efforts
Loved it! Thanks!
Frederico Vila Verde
Hope this helps.
That was an extremely helpful article.
Personally, I would rather see someone post one extremely good article a week than 5 or 6 not-so-great articles. I get the impression from some pro-blogger types that although they SAY quality content is paramount, they actually operate in a way that shows they are more concerned with impressing search engines with their frequency.
I also appreciate the fact that this article makes it quite plain that a blog is NOT going to be your main source of income. Many pro-blogger types distort that fact, which I have painfully found out to be true the hard way.
Thanks for your straight forward information.
Lorraine
Thanks Michel
Ian
What are you using to display that big "# Comments" thing in the upper right of each post? I've been wondering about that for a long time. Is it custom code or some plugin you have or what?
--Greg
<div class="commentbox">
<?php comments_popup_link('<span class=number>0</span>
<span class=comments>Comment</span>', '<span class=number>1</span>
<span class=comments>Comment</span>', '<span class=number>%</span>
<span class=comments>Comments</span>', 'comments-link', '<span class=reg_closed>Closed</span>'); ?>
</div>
However, I think "backwards" since I don't know if the post is out of date or note. It's a good thing to say that you update them, now I know.
Maybe you should add a line in your autoresponder message that indicate that the post is brand new for 2009 or something like that.
Why?
Because whenever I read a blog post, I expect the content to be from this week.
It may be just me.
Awesome tips.
Thanks,
Franck
the Body Guard Marketer
Remove Dates From Old Posts
This does a couple of things
1. It will remove the date from older post, such as you have still appearing below the tags
2. Removing dates from comments thus avoiding tons of comments referring to a post as being old.
It would probably be possible to add some extra logic to it, such that it doesn't remove the date on items which you might not consider evergreen, or were current news when posts, but now dated.
In addition it works on post_date so you would need to use some kind of "features" method to display reinvigorated posts on the front page - changing the date to refresh post order would make the times reappear. Not ideal.
Possibly better would be to add a new date field for when something was first published, which never changes, and control display of dates based upon that.
Will have to give Tim a nudge
I would love to see more information on how you use the spreadsheet to organize your content.
I never would have thought to use a spreadsheet to organize articles and blog content.
Justin
Terrance Charles
http://www.terrancecharles.com/blog
Great blog as usual. I would like to know more about basics of writing. I love to write but my skills are very basic. Can you suggest something please?
Regards
Amarjit
I have been wondering why you never posted the dates on your blog but now it makes sense.
I like the fact that you gave the links to the script that you use to add the important features to your blog.
Most people try to keep this kind of info secret.
Great article Michel!
Regards,
Ryan Bessling
http://tweetriches.com
I have had my eyes on your blog for years and implemented some of your ideas continually on my own blogs.
What time do you feel is appropriate to push the same (slightly re-freshened) article to your list?
Thanks again,
Peter
Carol
I have used number 4 for so long that my auto responder pre-populated for almost a year ahead. I think the biggest problem now is to go through and remove those emails that point to posts that are time dependent.
that was big mistake for me in the begging - sending people to posts that relied on information delivered at one point in time and no longer valid or outdated.
1) Either hire a freelancer to pull out a list of all those posts, in which order they're in, and you visit them one by one, over time, to update them or "genericise" them (or remove them altogether), or...
2) Subscribe to your own list. And keep an eye out for those outdated ones. When you get one that needs updating, you update it and broadcast to your list (no need to add it to your cycle because it's already there).
Again, I keep a spreadsheet of all my posts, and I have them listed by category, and the columns next to it indicates: a) updated? b) broadcasted? c) Tweeted? d) added to AR cycle?
I then color-code the background of the cells to indicate "green" (evergreen), "yellow" (evergreen but has broken/outdated links only), "orange" (needs updating), and "red" (cannot be evergreen at all, especially is tied to a current event, newspiece, or trend).
Hope this helps.
Since you can use dhtml in your posts could you not hide the dates using 'visibility hidden' but searching would not be confused with duplicate blog article names and only ,at most ,bring up more than one query response ?
Clare
http://menwithpens.ca/old-blog-posts/comment-pa...
Seems like you're still testing thingshere and here.
B
Very powerful idea to monetize any blog with good SERP. It will be pleasure if you add some handy tips to increase backlinks rapidly.
Thanks,
Great tips and I love #4 integrating the autoresponder! Never thought of that and I think the idea of NOT dating your post allows you to seamlessly go back and update or rewrite and then when the recipient on your email update visits the post it doesn't feel stale to them, i.e., you have routed them to an "old"posting. It is a perception issue.
These are actionable tips that many of which will pay off big over time if one does them with consistency, there is a cumulative effect that will be measured over time.
Thank you!
James
Lest I sound like all sour grapes, let me take the opportunity to commend you on your quality content and catchy email subjects. Your emails consistently catch my attention.