14 tips on how to increase your Blogs Page Views

Darren has a very useful post that gives us 14 tips on how to increase a Blogs Page Views. Here I have listed them with my own comments.

First of all why would you want to increase your blog’s pageviews? Some reasons Darren gives are

Stickiness - the more pages a reader views the increased chance of them coming back are.

Revenue - more and more of the ads that we are running on your blogs are impression based ads (i.e, the more times the ads are seen the more that is earned).

Let me list Darren’s points with my own comments.

1. Interlink your Posts: This is perhaps the most simple method to increase your pageviews. Whenever you write an article, check whether you have written similar articles. If so link to them. This is helpful for new readers as well as it is not necessary that all your readers have been with you from the beginning. But remember that too much interlinking can get your readers distracted from the original post.
2. Highlight Related Posts: For WordPress users there is a plugin called Related Posts that can automatically find related posts for you based on the keywords you used in the article. You can do this manually if you want, but I prefer the plugin as it is a lot easier. There may be a similar plugin for other Blog Platforms, but I am not sure about it.It is best that you place 5 related posts just after the post ends. You can find more useful WordPress Plugins here.
3. Add a Newsletter or Post Notification Services: Services such Zookoda and can be used to notify readers of new posts via email thereby increasing page views. I think that notifying new posts through emails are more effective than feeds as people check their mails many times a day.
4. Highlight Key Posts in Prominent Positions: You may have noticed that my header links to some of the important articles of johntp.com. When visitors reach this blog there’s a high chance that they will notice these links and click them. My header links has helped me almost double my pageviews.
5. Best of Pages: I have collected some of the best articles and put them on a separate page called Top Posts. This not only helps to increase pageviews but also helps in converting casual surfers to regular readers.I also use a WordPress Plugin called ‘Noteworthy‘ with which I mark some of the interesting articles. The plugin automatically puts the marked posts to a category. This can also help in increasing the pageviews of those posts. In short highlight your top posts in all ways possible.
6. Write a Series of Posts: A series of posts on a topic can drive readers from the first part to the last thereby increasing pageviews. Readers will also return often to read what you have to say on the next part.Although I suggest you don’t break every article into a series of posts as it may irritate some readers.
7. Use Extended Entires on your Front Page: For WordPress users there is a ‘more’ feature that breaks long posts with a ‘more…’ or ‘Continue reading post name‘ that links to the complete post. This can help in increasing pageviews but you must use it only for long posts as it can get annoying for certain readers when used too much.
8. Run a Blog Project or Meme: Group writing projects can get you new links and readers aswell as visitors who come back multiple times in a week to see what updates there had been to it. Projects or competitions works best if you have a lot of loyal readers willing to participate.
9. Excerpts in RSS feeds: If you use Full Feeds, your readers are likely to read your content through feeds and never return to your blog. To increase page views you may switch to Partial Feeds.Here at johntp.com, after switching to partial feeds I have found an increase in the number of people coming back and an unexpected increase in RSS readers.
10. Entice RSS Readers to Visit: If you decide to use Full feeds, you need to find ways to get your subscribers to visit your blog. Darren suggests methods such as Polls, writing posts in a way that invites comments and interlinking posts.
11. Build Interactivity into your Blog: The more your readers interact on your blog the more pages they view. Comments and polls are a good way to interact with readers.You can encourage comments by asking question or opinions at the end of evey post. If a reader leaves a comment or takes part in a poll they are likely to come back again to see if there are any replies to their comments or to find out the result of the poll. Building an interactive blog can increase your pageviews a lot.
12. Draw People Back to Comments: For WordPress users there are a few plugins that help you make your blog more interactive regarding comments. First is a plugin called Brian’s Latest Comments that shows an overview of the recently active articles and the last people to comment on them.You can also give your readers the opportunity to follow your comments either by having a RSS feed for comments on your blog or by allowing them to subscribe to comments via email with Subscribe To Comments WordPress Plugin.You can encourage your readers to comment more often by listing the Top 10 Commentators of your blog and linking directly to their blogs. You can do this automatically with the Top Commentators Wordpress Plugin.You can see all these plugins in action on my blog and find more here.
13. Add a Search Feature: Adding a Search feature to your blog allows your readers to search for previous posts thereby increasing pageviews. Your theme may already be having it by default.
14. Give Your Readers a Homework Assignment: I have not yet tried this method and so can’t comment on it. I am not even sure if it will work for my kind of blog. This method has more chance of working on blogs like Darren’s Photography Blog.

Some tips I would like to add are to put Calendars and Monthly Archives on your sidebar. I have got very good results even on the first day of having them on my sidebar. I suggest you try these too to increase your pageviews.

For K2 Blogs, I have written a tutorial on how to add a Calendar and Monthly Archives.

Find more interesting articles on my Blogging category.

Which of these tips have you already implemented on your blog? And which are you going to implement soon?