Getting Visitors Hooked by Linking Together Blog Posts

Posted in: Articles, Blogging|February 7, 20112 Comments

After having been blogging for a while, you are going to have an ever-growing archive of posts on subjects you might have briefly touched on in previous articles. These subjects now have dedicated posts where you have expanded on them. By linking these posts together you will help guide your visitors to your later articles and turn them into long-time readers for your website.

Say you published a post last week with the title “Impress People with your Elevator Pitch” (just like I did here) and this week are publishing a new article on “How to Show Genuine Interest for a Product”. If you didn’t read the post last week, one of the steps to a good elevator pitch is about showing genuine interest in what you are saying. We can all agree that the latter article adds value to the former, which just briefly touches on this vast subject.

When a visitor comes to your website, he or she will probably come to a specific post rather than to your homepage. If this visitor has never been to your site before, the visitor will not know of your expertise yet. When reading the article, your visitor will not go on and search for more articles on the sub-points in an article on your blog but just exit the site once the article has been consumed. In the best-case scenario, this visitor liked your content and will keep browsing and reading other articles, becoming hooked to your site.

Help your visitors find more!

Instead of leaving it up to the visitors to continue browsing the website for content that might be of interest, help them find content specific to what they came to read about. By linking together different posts on similar subjects on your website, what you are doing is feeding your visitors with additional links to click on whilst reading what they came to read.

You probably know yourself how can find yourself loose hours of time on websites just browsing and reading while you should be doing something else. This is precisely the effect that you can leverage in order to get visitors to stay longer on your site, read more and end up being regular readers and subscribers of your blog.

Link Keywords to Relevant Articles

One effective way of inserting other articles into the site is to go back and link keywords in previous posts to new articles. Conversely when creating a new blog post, go ahead and link in previous articles to new keywords. This way you create a natural chain for your visitors to go through, finding even more content on your site, without having to find it themselves. They are being fully served.

Offer Relevant Posts Manually

It is popular to have a section of “Relevant Posts” at the bottom of your blog entires, almost always generated by the CMS system or a plugin. What I would suggest is that you are different. While a plugin can algorithmically try to work out which posts go well together, you can do it better. By offering a hand-picked, manual list of posts that may be of interests to readers after finishing a post, you can increase the conversion-rate of these posts since they truly are related to what a user is looking for.

Adding links manually may take more time than just using a plugin but it is going to be worth it in the long-run. What you will notice is that you cannot do this at the moment you are just starting your blog. Give yourself some time to get some posts up there. Don’t think about adding relevant posts that are “sort of” relevant, just because you don’t have anything otherwise. Doing this will devalue the whole reason to doing this manually. Instead, be patient and add links whenever you feel that they are truly appropriate.