In my previous post, I addressed a series of posts from ProBlogger, on how to keep new readers coming back to your blog. As promised, I'm back with a second post of my own, offering further suggestions on how to engage readers and keep them coming back to your blog.
In Part II of his series of posts, Darren Rowse offers three important points to consider: individual page design, message, and providing pathways into your blog. There's even more great advice in parts three and four. I'd like to take on the first and third items.
There are other people who can address page design more effectively than I can, but in changing the template of my own blog I discovered a few details that you might want to keep in mind. Certainly, making sure your blog is easy to read is a big consideration in choosing a design, but to take things down to a more granular level, consider how easy it is for people to find the links in your posts. Links are an important part of blogging, because they give people a chance to check out your sources for themselves and draw their own conclusions, but only if they can find the links in the first place. Your best page CSS design can fall flat if your readers can easily locate the links in your posts. I discovered this upon briefly changing to a template that had this very problem. The current template had the same problem, which I managed to fix by tweaking the style sheet to make links appear bold and in a different color from the rest of the text.
One more word on design and links. When choosing a design for your blog, I'd recommend choosing either a two-column or three-column design over a single column design. Again, the reason is because of the importance of links. Rowse advises "Provide pathways into your blog," and he's right. Listing your blog categories in a sidebar is a more effective way to provide pathways for readers to dig deeper into your blog than putting them on a separate page of links—which is what you have to do if your blog uses a single-column design. With a two- or three-column design, if—upon reading a particular post—a reader want to see more on a particular topic, he or she is only one click away. Not so on a with a single-column design.
I think it's also important to provide pathways to other blogs. Linking to other blogs makes other bloggers—at least those who obsessively check their referrer stats—to visit your blog and include it in their blogroll, thus providing a pathway for their readers to visit your blog. Again, having to put your blogroll on a separate page puts more distance between you and the opportunity to connect with and share readers with other blogs.
I'll be back soon, with one more post on some of the points Rowse shares in parts three and four of his series. Stay tuned!
