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Day 16: Your Greatest Hits

On Teach42.com right now, I have 764 blog posts. I’ve written a few more, but they got lost between transitions before I settled on WordPress. Of those 764, 10 appear on the landing page. So when someone comes to visit my blog, those are the posts they see. If they have some time, maybe they’ll scroll back a few pages, but there may be some visitors that have no idea that I used to be an active podcaster. Or that I aggregated the top free WordPress themes for education. Or that I wrote up a summary of the things I learned from Twitter in a 24 hour period. Or that I built an iPod battery pack… out of an Atari 2600 cartridge!

The point is, as wonderful as a blog is for sharing your thoughts and ideas, information does tend to get buried rather quickly. Some of those posts, like the ones I mentioned above, are just as valid now as they were a 12, 24 or even 36 months ago. So today’s challenge is going to be adding a spot on your blog for your greatest hits, the posts that you think are your best, your most significant, and the ones that you think visitors to your blog should check out. Idea being, if they’re only going to be on your blog for a few minutes, what are the things that you’d like to show them?

So what posts should you provide links to?

  • Posts of yours that have received the most comments
  • A post where you describe your ‘blog’ mission statement, or why you got into blogging in the first place.
  • A blog post that you’re extremely proud of, whether it got comments or not (some of my favorites have gotten zero comments)
  • Any posts that you think would be worthwhile for people new to the blogosphere to read
  • In a nutshell, your favorites.

I want to re-emphasize, number of comments does not equal quality of post. There are a few posts I’ve written that have received a decent number of comments, but frankly I’m rather ashamed of. Others generated a lot of conversation, but I don’t necessary feel are all that significant or worth pointing out to people. Perhaps the information is dated and not relevant anymore.

Take some time to scroll through your archives and try to figure out which posts you think are worth sharing with people. There’s no magic number here, but I’d say between 5-10 are a good number. As to where you put them, you really have three options. You could just post it on your blog, which is great to remind current readers of your greatest hits, but doesn’t help future readers. Once again, in 10 posts, it’ll have scrolled off the front page. The second place is to put it in it’s own page. If you do so, you can link up the post as well as write a brief description of why people might be interested in it. Then you add a link to that page in your blogs navigation bar (many blog engines do this automatically).

The third option, which is the one I’ll be doing tonight, is to add it in to your sidebar. If you do that, then those links will appear on every page throughout your blog, so regardless of how people arrive, visitors will still be able to see them. This gets those posts the most exposure, but it also takes up real estate in your sidebar, something we’re trying to keep concise. So long as you don’t let it get out of control though, it shouldn’t take up too much space.

If you’re a new blogger, then maybe this is something that you may want to create space for, and update as you go along. Veteran bloggers, this may take some time to dig through.

Either way, once you’ve done the groundwork, share a comment here with what you think was your most significant blog post to date and why. And don’t forget to share a link to it!

30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

11/16/2008 14 Comments

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