Blog Tip: Encouraging Readers to Explore Your Site

If you blog, you've probably come across terms like pageviews, hits, stats, SEO, and unique visitors. After awhile, your eyes might glaze over...but you know that somehow these terms mean something and if you want to encourage your blog to grow, you better figure out ways to encourage readers and visitors to explore more of your site. 

We all want readers to dig around our blogs...those extra pageviews and clicks can mean more money in advertising dollars, more readers, and more traffic! 

One of the easiest and most common ways to get more clicks on your blog is to add a "plug-in" to your template. At the end of each post, the plug--in adds small thumbnails with links to related posts within your blog. Adding the code to your blog's template makes it so that the plug-in automatically appears after your blog post, directing readers to other posts you have that might interest them. My plug-in of choice is nrelate. 

For months and months, I resisted the urge to add a "plug-in" to my blog. Bloggers were all saying that this was a great way to encourage new readers to explore, but I was wary of messing with my blog's layout, the ones I had seen looked large and distracting, and it looked hard to figure out how to add the code to my design. 

When I finally decided to take the plunge and add a plug-in to my blog, I went with nrelate after reading rave reviews from other bloggers. I am so glad I did! 

My experience? 

The support team was fabulous, answering questions I had along the way. I've never seen a customer service rep respond so quickly! Installation was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be. 

I've found that, for the most part, the archived projects nrelate pulls for my posts are very relevant. This post for Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie ended with some thumbnails for older recipes on my blog:

A new reader would never have taken the time to dig through my archives to find those posts. I have labels on my sidebar, but why not take the extra step to provide links and photos for them? 

I really appreciare that nrelate allows you to customize your plug-in. I was able to choose the number of thumbnails, the size, and if I wanted to include an ad (another way to bring in some extra money!). 

Other great features:

-SEO Friendly (clicking on a thumbnail doesn't redirect through nrelate's site!)

-Increase pageviews by 5 - 12%

-If you have more than one blog, you can set it up to feature content from those sites as well

I've been very pleased with nrelate over the last year. The few times I've noticed an issue, the team has been very quick to step in and set everything back in place. 

You can sign up and install nrelate for Blogger here. It's free! You can also find out more about them on Facebook and Twitter. 

Do you use a plug-in to help readers find more of your content?


If you liked this post or found it helpful, I hope you'll click your "Pin It" button to add this post to Pinterest, or a +1 for Google+. 

*I wrote this post as part of a paid campaign with nRelate and Blueprint Social. The opinions in this post are 100% my own.