Keeping Good Blogs Alive

In preparing for a class on blogging, I went back and reviewed some of my old posts on blogs and blogging to see if there was something there that would be useful to present in class. I came across a couple of old posts that I thought were still relevant and very useful information.

One of them made a reverence to using "hard links" on your blog template to boost performance on postings of particular interest. I have liked that idea and have already used it to create links to my "tags" that I thought would be useful and convenient for my readers. I don't really want to create hard links to posts on the template because I think it would quickly become so overwhelming, such a large volume of links, as to be more confusing than useful. What that made me think of is the idea of creating a new post occasionally that points back to selected posts from the past.. That seems to me a better way to accomplish the desired result, as it allows me to reflect on and add new thoughts or comments to the material contained in the old posts, while reviving them with new links.

That is when I discovered that finding an old post was not all that easy, even when I knew just what I was looking for! I had no trouble finding the post to read, but locating the individual posting so I could link directly to it was much harder. This made me think about how valuable direct links could be to someone reading the blog who would not have the information to find a particular posting from the past without conducting a real search. That is important because you don't want people to have to search for something that you want them to read. You want to make  it very easy for them to find what you want them to read!

Anyway, with a little effort, I solved the problem and here are the two posts I wanted to revive:

First is a post with some tips for making a blog effective. One of the tips from the author I was quoting dealt with "Reigniting old posts", and his suggestion was a different idea, but triggered the idea I am proposing. I thought ihis suggestions were good in themselves, but was also interested that his ideas suggested something else to me that I used instead. It is important to keep in mind that ideas that you gather in your research should always be adjusted to your own needs and environment. This situation forms a good example of that concept.

Second is a post with an example of a company that found a blogging strategy that increased its business more than ten times! Anything that can do that is certainly worth taking a look at to see how it can be adapted to your circumstances! This example was a winery that gave wine to bloggers who had written about wine. The gift of the wine caused the bloggers to write about the wine on their blogs and the activity and attention turned into a big increase in sales for the winery.

Researching marketing is good because you learn things that can be useful to you as you can see from the "6 Tips" article, but creativity really makes for the big payoff as illustrated by the story in the second article.

Footnote: The winery article said that they increased their business by "more  than a factor of ten"! That is a nice increase, but if I read the numbers correctly, their increase was way, way more than a factor of ten!! Check it out and see what factor you come up with...