How a simple CMS element in your Wordpress blog can increase your Page Views
A Wordpress blog is unquestionably the ultimate free CMS (content management system), that one could get his/her hands on. But however, Wordpress is made to be used by systems that gets updated more frequently than others. So, the ultimate downfall, as I see in Wordpress is that it’s relatively harder to highlight the content that had been published in the past.
If there are posts that people could gain something from, despite of the date which they had been published on, people will read them. News themes like Revolution really had understood this and they display categories as the main navigation in the blog header. This leads a user directly to a category that he/she is interested in, therefore, leading targeted readers to targeted content, in the most efficient way possible.
For an instance, if a person visits my blog by accident from a social network like StumbleUpon, and if he/she is interested in Social Media, she can directly click through to the “Social Media” section, and check out the latest published Social Media articles. That would give more use of my blog to that user, than a scenario where he/she could find one social media article from the latest published posts.
Most of us think that merely displaying categories in the sidebar could get things done. True! If you have around 10-12 categories and you could place them higher on the sidebar. But, the most effective way to do is to lay your categories out in the header, where most of the people will look for navigation.
That’s why Wordpress news themes harness more page views than typical Wordpress themes. If you can tweak your existing theme to display your most important categories in the header, that could really work well for you. It’s important to pick the most important ones because usually, we tend to have more that 20 categories in established blogs.
Although news themes come packed with this feature, most of the time, the tweaking will have to be done manually. I had to edit my blog header through a HTML editor to do it. But, there are a few ways in displaying your categories like a typical CMS (horizontally in the header), through advanced Wordpress tweaks. But, you might not want to display all your categories there, which is why it’s better to use a HTML editor and design it manually.
Since implementing that on ROCKFUSE, I’ve seen really good results. To make a long story short, More exposure to your content = more page views = more convinced readers = more subscribers. Just thought of sharing this with you since, it’s an effective way of harnessing the most of what you get, blog-traffic-wise.
Great tip, I’ll try to do that in my blogs!
Thanks. Let us know how it goes.
Interesting. I usually put some random/related posts (using a plug-in) after a post to make sure that my old posts have been appearing at least here and there
That’s awesome. I use a tweak of Popularity Contest to display the recently popular posts., in my sidebar.
Interesting point of view here. There is a lot of difference from using free theme and premium theme where the latter usually allocate above-the-fold places for certain categories and perhaps featured stories.
A catchy title and eye-catching thumbnails often help to increase more clicks.
Yan
Hmmmn, thanks for this post. I don’t use Wordpress but I am thinking of switching. I’d really appreciate your insights on switching from Blogger to Wordpress, thanks…
Excellent post. I just found your blog on EntreCard and I will be back. Great advice and great article. I agree that the downside to blogs is that the page views per visitor is usually low for most blogs due to how they are laid out. I am always looking for new ways to improve this. I may have to look into a horizontal navigation.
Simple tweaks on any blogs makes a big difference.
It can greatly affect on the overall impact of the site and can generate more page views.