How Not to Blog: Don’t Force Page Views on Readers

As many of you know, when submitting a story to social news or bookmarking site, you risk having a lot of traffic to that page alone and having people leave your site immediately after reading the post in questions. There are several things you can do to keep readers engaged and direct them to different articles: really great content, related posts, links in your sidebar and many more.

But the purpose of this article is not to teach you how to go about getting legitimate traffic; it is to show you how not to act to get the same, yet temporary result. There’s a new practice: something mixing the multiple page posts with the well know “read full post link” used on blog homepages. It translates into going to the post page, reading one or two paragraphs and seeing a “read more” link.

It’s annoying! And it will work once, twice, three times, but after having the nice reader click and see the entire article, you are back to square one: how do you keep them from moving to a different site?

Besides, readers, like a lot of other people, are lazy sometimes. They like to get what they were promised and what they expect when following a link. All of us social media users expect a full article when we hit that link, so it’d better be there! Let’s say the content is OK and we move past our urge to close the tab and we actually read. What do you think will happen at your next submission? Will we click again or simply click away?

Is your content worth “spending” an extra-click?

And here comes the ugly part. After the initial page intro, when actually clicking the artificial “more” link, the content is crappy. This is the worst scenario. It might increase the number of page views and add an extra second to the time spent on site, but it still would make readers run away at speed of light afterward.

Are multiple pages any different? I for one prefer having the content placed in a few pages to endlessly scrolling down to reach the end of a post. But if you add a new page after every two paragraphs, it’s not better than what I’ve described above. So when deciding how to present your content to social media readers, leave the petty metric goals for later, and think of how to better welcome your guests.

This article has 7 comments

• 

  Corey Freeman

  January 19th, 2009

  Depending on the website and the content levels, I’ll go for a “read more” link. For example, if the blog has some seriously involved and intricate posts. However, if it’s just generic content, I’m not about to “read more.”
• 

  Daphne

  January 20th, 2009

  Hi Alex,

  I agree it’s annoying to keep being redirected. For that reason I prefer the whole post to be on one page so I just scroll down. Is there a reason you prefer a long post split into multiple pages?
• 

  Mitch

  January 20th, 2009

  I liked this post, but I go the other direction with your last paragraph. There’s this one particular SEO blog that I used to read, but stopped because it was irritating me. Every article was four pages long, and I don’t mean the articles were long. It was just too formulaic, and having to go through four different pages just to read one post got on my nerve, so I dropped it. I want an entire article right there for me; even on news sites, if I can find the “print” link, which usually puts the article on one page, I’ll pick that.
• 

  Cory O'Brien

  January 20th, 2009

  I couldn’t agree more! I feel the same way about partial RSS feeds too. Sure, you’re boosting page views by forcing people to visit your site to see a full article, but chance are, half will visit the site and boost your page views, but half (including me) will just stop reading and find similar content elsewhere. Let people read your content where they prefer, and if you want to boost your revenue, then just put an ad in the RSS feed. It’s silly to think that you can do things that are annoying and frustrating for your readers and have them keep coming back for more.
• 

  Rajtilak Bhattacharjee

  January 21st, 2009

  In the end, I still feel that content is the King. With good content along with a good SEO backup, a site can rise from rags to riches in no time.
• 

  Sheryl Loch

  February 3rd, 2009

  Hello Alex,
  I will click once but, that is it.
  I normally read the post and comments and then scan the article again if I am going to make a comment. I like to make sure I read it right the first time before I open my mouth.
  If I have to click through and then back, it is just to much trouble. I also feel like they are using me and my clicks for to much personal gain.
• 

  Udegbunam Chukwudi

  September 17th, 2009

  On such blogs/sites, I only continue clicking if and only if I’m DESPERATE for the info been offered. Other than that I move on.

Add a comment