For day 13 of 31 Days to Kick Your Blog in the Butt I wanted to revisit some of the other techniques we can use to increase the usability of our blogs for our readers. Another way to enhance the readers experience and pushing them deeper into our blogs.
Today’s Lesson
If you have been blogging for any length of time you have content on your blog. At least if you have been listening to me and a few others, you should have content on your blogs. The problem is, unless it is on the front page of your blog. Or in other words, the first 5 to 10 post, it is not going to get noticed, unless your readers are digging deeper into your blog. This is where you can take advantage of what I like to call Theme Pages.
A Theme Page is a page you put together on a particular topic, niche, blog category or one of my favorites a series of post. You are simply taking any number of blog post you want, putting links to them in one place, a Themed Page and using it to get your readers to go back and visit those blog post.
Shall we take some creative license here and use the definition of a Theme Park to explain a Theme Page.
A Theme Page is a generic term for a collection of post assembled for the purpose of providing information and links to blog posts in one central location. A Theme Page is more elaborate than a single blog post and can be used to attract even more readers to your blog as it puts more information in one location for your readers to see than can be done with a single post. Most if not all Theme Pages have a fixed location unlike a single blog post which will move down in your archives until it is eventually buried under a number of subsequent blog post.
Often a Theme Page will have various post or sections devoted to telling a particular story or may be focuses on a particular category of your blog. Blog post on the other hand will usually have some form of a theme. But in the Theme Page all of the items in the Page go with the theme of the Page. With the Theme Page you can include any number of links to previous blog post in that particular theme as you want.
Benefits of Theme Pages
1. They get your readers to dig deeper – In my opinion, this is really the biggest advantage of the Themed Page. When we do a blog post, we work hard on putting them together. And for the most part, they are on the front page of the blog until they are pushed down and into the archives by more blog post. Using a Theme Page is one way we can extend the life of our blog post and keep them in front of our readers for a long, long time. Our readers will also dig deeper into the dark corners of our blogs and may even find other post which answers questions they are looking for.
2. Good for SEO – Remember with a Theme Page you are linking to internal blog post. And just like Google likes external links coming in, it also likes internal links to our own stuff.
3. Theme Pages will keep people coming back – Your visitors and readers are looking for information. And if they are brand new to your blog and they find a lot of good, relevant information on one page such as a Theme Page, they are going to come back time and time again.
Types of Theme Pages
Just like Theme Parks, there are any number of different types of Theme Pages you can come up with and use on your blog. Here are some of the possible Pages you could use.
Series Theme Page – This is an easy one. And what is best about using a series Theme Page, it actually forces you to write. If you are wanting to set up some Theme Pages and you don’t know what to do one on, do a series of post on a particular topic or “theme” and then compile them into one central location, your Theme Page. Here are a couple of examples of how I used the Series Theme Page on this blog. And we will be doing a special Series Theme Page for this very series too. Be watching for more details in the next few days.
Category focused Theme Page – Remember assigning categories to your blog post is important as that is the table of contents to your blog. But you can even use a specific category to set up a Themed Page on your blog. Just take one or even more than one related categories and compile them into a “Category Focused Theme Page.”
Twitter Theme Page – One of the topics we will be talking about very soon is the twitter landing page. For today, I just want to mention that a twitter landing page is nothing more then a Theme Page. It serves the same function of any other Theme Page as it gets your visitors deeper into your blog. Here is my twitter landing page and we will discuss this more in a few days.
“Best of” Theme Page – Usually these types of pages can be based on a certain time frame on your blog. Or you could compile a “best of” Theme Page based on the blog post which get a lot of comments. These could be post from a particular month, week or even a year. The only limit is just your imagination.
Promoting your Theme Page
Just like a new blog post, if you don’t promote them and tell people they are there, no one is going to find and read your Theme Page. When you do a new Theme Page, tell the world about it. Do a blog post and link to it. Tweet about it on twitter and ask your twitter friends to retweet it for you. Put a 125×125 banner “ad” on your blog directing your readers to your Theme Page. Similar to what we did here with this series. Compile a list of your Theme Pages and put them in your sidebar or your footer. You could even put a new tab in your navigation bar to direct your readers to your Theme Pages.
There are really no limits on how you can promote your new Theme Page. The final thought on Theme Pages is whether they should be actual Pages or post. Why not both? When you first do Theme Page publish it as a post and later as a permanent Page in your blog.
Today’s Homework
Go forth and put together a Theme Page on your own blog. Once you have done this, please come back and leave a comment with a link so we can all see the different ways of compiling a Theme Page.
