Blog Training and How-To Guide for Business Blogging

This week on Blog Chalk Talk we're discussing the benefits of inter-linkin. Wednesday, Easton offered some basic tips and how-tos and just a little while ago Kimberlee presented a brain based example of applied inter-linking. Today's expert blogging tip is courtesy of Dan Smith, Know More Media General Manager and staff writer. 

You can make more orange juice by either buying more oranges or by squeezing more juice from your existing oranges. Applying this to blogging, you can increase your blog traffic by either bringing in new external traffic or by squeezing more page views out of your existing traffic. 

What is the best system to use for finding your own content and consistently linking back to it?

I suggest keeping a master list or spreadsheet of your best 20-30 posts (with their URLs). You might want to organize these posts by topic. Each time you write a new post, refer to this list and see if you have an already-published post you have written that is somewhat related to any part of your new post, then provide a link back to that post in your new post, using a good keyword in your content.

It might take some footwork to get your list created, but once you’ve done it, this intra-linking will become simple and quick, and it will be easy to maintain the list and add new posts as you write them.

Intra-linking has brought great results to Dr. Ellen Weber, whose BrainBasedBusiness.com enjoys an average of 1.8 page views per visitor, which is one of the best averages in our entire network.

Another idea: splitting your posts

In short, when you write a new post, put the first half in the main “Entry Body” box and the second half in the “Extended Entry” box (this may vary depending on your blogging software). Doing this forces a “Continue Reading” break for each post, so that a person on the main page of your blog will need to click through to the individual post to read its entirety, thus gaining you an extra page view. This same technique also makes your RSS feeds abbreviated, so that RSS readers will need to click through to your post to read the entire post, thus bringing more traffic.

Sometimes, increasing traffic is not a factor of working harder or longer, but working smarter. Intra-linking to your own posts is working smarter, and doesn’t take much time once you get your system in place. Splitting your posts is working smarter, and takes practically no extra time at all. Adopting these two practices will help improve our overall traffic.