Paul Boag

Your blog is broken

Author:
Paul Boag
Email the author
Published:
07 September 2011
Categories:
Content Strategy
Reading time:
1 minutes

Whether you are running a personal blog or one for your business, the chances are it is broken. Fortunately, it can be fixed.

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I have a love/hate relationship with blogs. On one hand they have been instrumental in bringing self publication to the masses and turning bland corporate news sections into something a bit more interesting. On the other, it strikes me that the premise of a blog is fundamentally broken.

In my article for the Web Designer Depot about blogging I write:

Most content posted to a blog is lost in the ever-growing archive. This is such a waste both from the perspective of the user, who is missing out on valuable advice, and the website owner who has low page views and high bounce rates.

Although tags and categories help to some extent they don’t really solve the problem. It is something I have been struggling with as I redesign boagworld.

Fortunately there are things you can do to make content on your site more findable. Techniques include:

  • Making featured more than just recent.
  • Popular posts.
  • New user guides.
  • Theme posts.
  • Related posts.
  • Other posts by this author.
  • Making better use of categories and tags
  • Better search.

All of the above I explore further in ‘Why you have a broken blog and how to fix it’.

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