eXtra For Every Publisher

One thing that many bloggers forget is to consistently add new content to their blogs. On many of the blogs I have written on, I try to keep putting out at least one post a day during weekdays, and take the weekends off.

I don’t always take the weekends off, and I don’t always post every weekday, but that is the exception rather than the rule.

A consistent posting schedule is powerful for many reasons.

Subscribers

People that subscribe to your blog only see new content, and thus their only draw to your site is the new items showing up in their feed readers, or e-mail inbox.

If your quality is high and they are interested in what you are doing, consistently posting will keep them subscribed, and long term subscribers can be difficult to attain in this day and age. I, myself, have unsubscribed from hundreds of blogs that haven’t continuously posted new content.

Search Engines

Fresh content makes search engines happy. That is, in part, why blogs do so well with Google’s search engine. Not only does the new content get indexed, but it makes the whole front page of your blog new and fresh.

Some people have said that Google keeps track of how often new content is added and uses that as part of its indexing schedule.

Overall Blog Growth

Every new piece of content has a chance to bring in new readers, entertain previous readers, and grow your blog.

When a blog doesn’t have new content over an extended period of time, I eventually remove it from my daily reading list, and unfortunately, I don’t return usually for a long time.

Summary

I can’t think of a single blogger who would say that keeping a manageable publishing schedule that people can rely on is a bad thing.

It doesn’t have to be every day, or even every weekday, but once you decide what schedule you are going to use, try to stick with it for the best results.

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John Chow might be kicking himself a bit right now as the advertising spot he sold on his site originally for $1000 USD has made others much more than that, and is now going to be sold once again.

After the Google 300×250 ad spot was flipped the first time, some readers speculated if it would be flipped again. Well, those speculations are about to come true. It seems Rich4Life.Us, the buyer of the ad spot will be flipping the spot to advertisers for the last 10 days of the ad run.

The advertisers blame a slow down on sales coming from the advertisement and have begun selling spots which will help make them even more from their now seemingly small investment. A brilliant move by all those involved.

I look forward to seeing what John does with the advertisement next month.

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Don’t you hate it when blogs take forever to load due to the dozen full length posts including images that the person has decided to put on their front page, and every page of their blog? You wonder if it is worth it to stick around to see what they have written.

Or how about when you go to a blog that shows only the title, and the first few sentences, and asks you to click read more on every single post? Feels like you have to jump through hoops just to read their content.

The choice to only show summaries or full posts on your blog can be quite difficult, but each has its advantages and disadvantages. I try to have the best of both worlds.

The Decision

One of the things that I have done here at Xfep is to make sure posts on the front page show the full post, and after they transition to other pages, I only show a summary. I did this for a few reasons, including search engine optimization, and better presentation of my previous work.

People have questioned me about this practice, as I do it on all my blogs.

Why don’t I make all the pages show full content? Well, with having full posts on every page, you begin to delay page loads, and making people wait is a bad idea. Also, most people don’t read past a few paragraphs unless they really enjoy the content.

There are also search engine benefits to limiting your duplicate content as much as possible. If I wanted even more search engine optimization benefits, I wouldn’t show any full articles, except on the single article’s own page.

Doing this has some negatives though, as using a system like mine means that readers are interrupted during their read of an article. They must perform an action to continue to the end of the post, and this turns some people off. Also, we come back to the waiting issue once again, as when people do find the article they want to read, they have to wait for that full page to load.

I find though that the positive aspects of the system that I use outweighs the negatives.

The Steps

If you want to do what I have done, and automate the whole process, I can show you how I do it. It might not be the best way, but it works for me. Please feel free to give me tips or tricks you might have, if you know a better way.

I will assume you are using WordPress to publish your blog. I am sure other systems can do something similar, but this will show how to make pages two to infinity show partial posts, while the main page shows full articles.

Once logged into your WordPress administration panel, go to Presentations and then Theme Editor.

Over in the right hand side, you will see a list of files. We will want to edit the Main Index Template, also known as index.php.

If you are unable to edit the file inside the WordPress administration panel. You will have to FTP into your hosting space and download the index.php file from your theme’s directory.

In this file we are looking for the code that allows us to show the post content.

The line should look something like:
<?php the_content("Continue reading →"); ?>

We want to change this so that we test to see where we are, and that will determine how the content is displayed.

The below basically says that if we are on the home page, page one, the search page, single page, or content page, we should display the full content, otherwise, we should show an except.

<? if (is_home() && (!$paged || $paged == 1) || is_search() || is_single() || is_page()): ?>
<?php the_content("Continue reading →"); ?>
<? else: ?>
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
<? endif; ?>

Once you update the file with the new code, replacing the old one line content code, your first page should show full articles, while every other page should show only excepts. A great way to boost the search engine optimization of your site, and display teasers to your posts in a quick loading fashion.

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In one of the many Link Karma posts on Copyblogger, this blog was mentioned, and even though the link was mixed in with many others on the site, Copyblogger still brought the highest amount of traffic a non-social bookmarking site has brought to date.

With over 250 unique visitors, and a rather noticeable feed subscription boost in the twenty four hours after the link to this blog, I would say that getting mentioned on Copyblogger is pretty powerful, especially for a starting out blog. The visitors were also higher quality than most social bookmarking traffic, having checked out many articles on this site, as well as subscribing to the RSS feed.

A big thanks from me goes out to Brian Clark and the Copyblogger team. And for those of you entering a niche where copywriting is key, let Brian know about what you are writing, and just maybe you will be mentioned.

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A blog I really enjoy, Dumb Little Man, has posted how he blogs, including his daily routine. For a blogger that maintains a full time job, I have to admit, I am quite jealous of how far he has come, but his daily schedule is a bit more than I could handle. Four hours of sleep just isn’t enough for this blogger.

Here is a snippet from his post:

Do it right: Choose a topic that you are seriously in love with. I love saving time and money and obviously that is what Dumb Little Man is all about. When I write, the ideas flow without much thought. If you goal is to make money, you should still choose something you love and not what pays the most in advertising. If you choose something based on money, your writing will suffer and you will subsequently get no visitors. Guess what…no visitors = no advertisers = no money.

Check out his full post over at Dumb Little Man.

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