Help Your Readers Find Your Old Blog Posts

By Jeffrey Kishner

Blogs are designed to publish an author’s most recent entry at the top of the page, pushing older posts further down the page, and eventually into the archives. This format is great if you’re writing a diary or a news blog, because your readers want to know about the latest happenings in your life or niche.

However, this format does not always work for astrology blogs. Astrology, of course, is dependent upon time, so if you’re only writing about the most recent astrological events (lunations, ingresses, mundane aspects) then your readers will want to go to the home page of your blog to view whatever has been most recently posted. But if you write about the art of astrological interpretation, you risk having some of your best material buried in the archives, where your readers will not be able to find it.

How do you help your readers find your old content? There are several options:

Tag Your Posts

This is the easiest solution. If you’re writing about the current Saturn square Pluto aspect, you can tag your post “Saturn,” “Pluto” and “mundane astrology.” If you’re writing about the love styles of Capricorn men, tag it “Capricorn” and “relationships.” The point is to help your readers easily find your old posts by topic, so don’t go overboard. If you have a tag cloud in your blog’s sidebar that has 200 words, you’re likely to overwhelm your reader, so don’t include a tag for every single celebrity you write about. Keep it simple!

Include Related Posts at the End of Each Blog Entry

An easy way to let your readers explore old content is to include a short list of posts that are thematically related to the one they’re reading. If you’ve written some great articles about the nodes, be sure to include them in your most recent post about them. Some blog platforms have plugins that automatically generate these for you, but the plugin will not do as good a job as you will, so just search through your archives and include your three best posts in a bullet-pointed list.

Link to Old Posts From Within Your Article

Why wait for the reader to finish reading your post to find more relevant articles? You can find terms or phrases in your copy and hyperlink them to stuff in your archives. Be mindful of best practices: Don’t write something like, “You can read my other article about this here.” Rather, you can write, “In my previous post about the South Node in Leo…”

Create Special Pages That Link to Your Best Posts

Although a reader can click through your archives, the experience looking for a specific post can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. If you’ve written a whole bunch of articles about a specific topic, create a page on your blog (if your blog platform allows) and include a short introduction with a list of links. I do this for Sasstrology; each zodiac sign has its own dedicated page with links to nearly all the blog posts about that sign. (For example, see Scorpio.)

Include a Search Box

Your blogging software may natively come with a search box, but it may not do a terribly good job. You can use services like Lijit or Google Custom Search to help your readers get a Google search listing of whatever your reader is looking for.

Widgets Galore

Depending on your blog platform, you may be able to add a widget that features your most popular posts (and other variations, like “most commented,” “most visited,” etc.). Your most popular posts may not be your best posts – the ones you really want to feature – so use these widgets with caution.
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About the Author

Jeffrey Kishner is editor/publisher of Sasstrology. He is also a regular contributor at AOL Horoscopes. Jeffrey is available for professional consultations regarding WordPress blogs and social media optimization. You can contact him at jeffreykishner@gmail.com.
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Starting As An Astrology Blogger

As an astrologer, I’ve written a weekly column for the past few years for a local publication. As fun as it was to write a column weekly, I wanted to expand my audience. Searching the web I found this ad:

451 Press is always looking for bright, talented writers who want to have their voices heard. We are looking for writers with unique voices to contribute to our growing network of blogs. Our blogs cover a wide range of topics. If you have a passion for a subject then we just might have a place for you.

One of the subjects they need a writer: astrology! Perfect. I filled out the application, attached a couple of writing samples and waited about two weeks before I heard back. 

Thank you for your recent application to write for 451 Press. After carefully reviewing your application we think you would make a great fit for our Astrology blog.

What? That easy? No interview? No request for further samples? Whoa!

But, in going through the next step of the process, The Weblog Agreement, I soon learned a bit of what I was in for. I was to provide content and artwork, post a least five times a week, with appropriate links to other web sites and get this, put all this up myself on a Word Press template, putting in some information using HTML. 

That was the least of it. Blogging, as it turned out, is more than just putting up content and having a host of people find your wonderful web page. And unfortunately, belonging on a network didn’t give me an instant readership. As I found out, astrology is a very small niche. Very few astrology blogs gain the kind of readership that more generic blogs garner. You have to work at bringing in those readers.

Still, if you have a passion for writing about astrology, there is no better way to get your writing out there. You can post what you want to, on any subject you care too write about. But blogging is more than writing content. You have many decisions to make before you lay down your first words. Where do you want to blog? How do you want your blog to look? Once you set up your blog then you need to work on drawing in readers. How are you going to promote it? For those people with few technical skills these can seem like daunting tasks. In the posts that follows we’ll take on those subjects and more.