Make Your Blog Post Pages More Effective

And Get Rid of those Peek-A-Boo Comments

Today I want to take a look at how we can make our posts pages more effective. Most of us obsess so much over our home page that we can neglect our equally important post pages.

If you will look at your blog statistics service you should notice that a large portion of your incoming traffic is arriving at your individual post pages –NOT your home page. So why not make your post pages work harder for you?

Tip: Think of the post page as your secondary home page where you can put additional information such as:

Take a closer look at what I’ve done with my post pages and you will see what I mean.

Quick Blog Tip: It’s a common mistake using peek-a-boo comments because it keeps your readers on your main page. I know they’re cool to watch in action but for obvious reasons they are counterproductive.

Another good reason to not use peek-a-boo comments is it uses scripts. If your readers have turned off java in their browser for security reasons they will not be able to read the full post from your home page.

Instead, for readers arriving at your home page you should show a short teaser paragraph of your posts with a read more link at the bottom to gently move your readers over to your post page. To see how it works you click on the “read full story” links on my home page.

Cool eh? It’s magic!

Another good reason for using this technique is to make your home page less cluttered and sharing the information load between your home page and the post page. It will make your home page open faster because it has less stuff to load.

For example:

It makes your large posts shorter (on the home page) so that your readers can quickly skim through your posts to find what they want to read.

Your readers will appreciate it because their time is important. Which is also a reason why some bloggers have opted to use the peek-a-boo-comments method in the first place, but for reasons already stated this technique that I’m discussing is much better.

You accomplish this by making your first paragraph a teaser summary of what they can expect to read in the rest of the post so that your readers can make a quick decision whether or not they want to read more.

Blogger users can learn how to implement the ’read more’ technique here: ‘Read More’ Expandable Post Summaries

Wordpress users can implement it within their write post dashboard.

Share information in your sidebar between your home page and the post page:

   1. For example, you might want to put your blogroll on your home page but not on the post page;

   2. In your post page you could also put additional advertisements in the sidebar;

   3. Or you could put a widget showing who has commented on your posts on your home page sidebar, but not in your post page because your comments are already shown there, etc.

You can make it a mashup and you are only limited by your imagination, so get your post pages working for you today.

Can you think of another use for your post pages?

UPDATE: This post has been recently updated May 12, 2008.