Why You Should Use Roundup Posts for Your Blog: Benefits and Recommendations
I’m sure most of you out there have written some pretty good blog posts in the past month. These articles might be currently sitting in your archives or inner pages, only to be mostly discovered by search engine visitors.
Some adventurous readers might casually browse through your blog page by page, but not all have the time nor the inclination to do so.
A solution is to use roundup or summary posts, which are simply short link-heavy posts which highlight some of the great content you’ve written within a specific time frame.
There are several clear benefits in doing roundup posts:
- Reinforces your blog niche. Sometimes bloggers tend to dabble in several off-topic posts or articles and deviate from their blog’s original focus. Roundup posts are a great way to selectively showcase posts that strongly pertain to your blog niche, while giving the illusion of content consistency.
- Provides convenience for your readers. If you publish several posts in one day, you’ll eventually end up with a large amount of posts for each week or month. Casual readers of your blog may miss a few posts here and there, and bringing them all together allows them to go through material they haven’t read.
- Offers a bite-sized snapshot and introduction to your blog. Like other posts on your blog, the summary article is likely to pick up some traffic from search engines. Visitors arriving at the roundup post will immediately be introduced to a list of strong articles with commentary. This is an excellent way to develop a good first impression.
- Internal Linking is healthy. Internal linking can pass PR value to your individual post pages and is a opportunity to repeat keyword anchors, which further define webpages in the eyes of search engines and may help you rank better for your post titles.
Which Posts should I include in the roundup?
There are several methods you can use to choose the blog posts. You could pick the ones which are well-written and presents your central blog theme in the best possible way.
An alternative would be to pick them according to the number of comments or links they’ve each received or the number of pageviews according to your stats package.
I would suggest structuring roundup posts around a specific timeframe. If you make multiple posts (5 to 10 posts) everyday, it might be useful to do a weekly roundup because of the heavy volume. If you only write one post a day or every few days, a monthly roundup would be ideal.
And so to take my own advice.. Dosh Dosh Roundup for April 2007
Here is the first ever round-up post on Dosh Dosh! The links below aren’t organized in any particular order for now, and are ones which I think are fairly well received while a few which deserve more attention are also included in the lineup.
Social Media Optimization and You: Networking to Grow Your Online Business
- Emphasizes the importance of actively networking with your audience through multiple platforms and communication channels. Useful if you find it difficult to connect with your blog readers as well.
Making Money with Forums: 15 Effective Monetization Tips for Forum Owners
- An list of 15 easy ways anyone can use to monetize your forums successfully. Something you want to bookmark if you ever plan to set up a forum with the ultimate goal of making money online.
Six Powerful Blog Strategies that will Rapidly Increase Your Affiliate Referrals
- Blog based affiliate promotional strategies that will help you to get more referrals through simple blogging. Includes search optimization strategies as well as a basic checklist to follow before you publish that post with your affiliate link in it.
An Extensive Guide to T-Shirt Affiliate Marketing
- A very comprehensive collection of T shirt affiliate programs which you can sign up for immediately. Also includes a brief guide on setting up and getting traffic to your T Shirt affiliate website.
Pre-empting the Buyer: How to Increase Affiliate Conversions and Advertising Sales
- An analysis of Aaron Wall’s SEO Book sales letter which brings out an important tip which you can easily use to boost your affiliate landing page conversions or ad sales for your blog or website.
Thoughts on Contextual Advertising: Site Building, Monetization and Ethics
- An article about contextual advertising programs like Adsense and how it can help you make money from your website. I think its important to place more emphasis on site building than monetization from the onset. Shoemoney seems to agree.
How to Get Strong Referral Traffic from Social Websites: A Simple Linkbait Tactic
- This article is a case study and shows you how to go big on social websites like Reddit or Digg, even if your site niche is not inherently attractive to the masses.
Direct Advertising Sales for Beginners: Setting up an Alternative Revenue Source
- This is the first article on my series on direct ad sales for blogs and websites. The article itself includes links to four other detailed posts on a variety of topics such as advertising options, setting your own ad rates as well as ways to find advertisers for your site. If you’ve ever been interested in selling ads without the intervention of any middlemen, here is the best place to start.
An Informative Guide to Google PageRank: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know
- The perfect way to learn more about Google PageRank. I’m putting this post up just because of its sheer educational value. Very strongly recommended for PR-obsessed bloggers or webmasters.
Think more bloggers should know about the benefits of round-up posts?
Great idea. I while back I did a similar thing listing some popular posts I did – yours is great , the screen captures work well.
http://goldcoaster.wordpress.com
Good idea and I like the way you did the roundup with screen captures.
Interesting idea, this is kind of similar to the silo structure in which an webmaster interlinks pages within their website. I have made some pretty good blog posts in the past and i hate for them to get buried. Here is one idea, towards the end of the year, each blogger should check their old blog posts. Whichever one has the most votes or diggs they should gather and make a blog post and call it the “ultimate post of 2007,” or the “best post of 2007,” or something of that nature, that blog post should get a good amount of visitors
.
http://www.imutopia.com
That is a good idea. I have used Archivist plugin in my blog which displays randomly one older post as a second post.
Great idea..
Some time, relevant post plugin might help reader digg out old archieves if the topic is similar in content.
That’s another way of highlighting and help to keep the visitors around.
Nice roundup =)
Brillant idea, trully some the post i have in my archieves are the best i made and i was thinking how to bring them back to “life”. Its enough for me to make a summary post.
In a similar vein if your blog is providing information and recommendations for making money you might want to include a summary update of what success you are achieving. I did this in a post at the end of 2006 by setting the scene in where I am investing and then at the end of March I did a post to review how things were going after the first quarter. Whilst a slightly different approach it does provide the reader with evidence that you actually use your own recommendations and in my case am happy to report on failures as well as those that succeed. For new readers it shows that there is some consistency about the post content and that you have a track record to add some credibility.
John,
Thanks for your comment, John. I’m not too sure if publishing a list of unverifiable and alleged earning figures and numbers can actually provide credibility. Might be inspiring but there are other ways of establishing credibility or a proven track record as well.
But I do get your point. Something to take note of in the future. -)
Maki,
Can you also show us how you managed to come out with all those beautiful screenshots? I couldn’t help looking at those…
I like to have a ‘Top Posts’ section on my blog. Every month I add what I consider to be the best articles I wrote the previous month. This saves them from languishing in the depths of my archives!
- Martin Reed
Hi Dosh..
I never thought that summing up your posts at month end is a crazy way to tell your readers what has been happening in your blog.. It’s easier for them to search the archives, instead of overloading them with info..
Thanks for dropping by the Unofficial Hits4pay Blog too..If you would like to help spread it to the Hits4pay community, you may consider linking the blog up yea?
-John leow
@John Leow,
Overloading them with info?
I don’t think putting out a few links in a post will do that. Users DON’T have any incentive to go through your archives and probably won’t unless they are looking for specific information or unless your blog is absolutely mouth-watering.
I’m also taking into account the other factors I’ve mentioned above as well.. particularly search traffic and the niche focus.
@Chris,
I’m using Snagit to do the screen captures, though you could easily use any other software to achieve the same effect..
Yea..i think that’s kinda true from your viewpoint too..I feel that properly organised categories help tremendously in terms of layout.The weird thing about Blogger is that it does not have a categories feature(which i truely wished blogger would have!) We would have to do a Blogger hack or some other technique(etc. search engine)to get that effect.
I’ll check Snagit,as it sounds like a cool way to get screen captures, besides the usual ‘Prt Scrn’ method haha…
Wow! I couldn’t have found this at a better time. I’m just finishing week one of a two-week book promotion tour with three other authors at my blog. Of course, the announcement sank towards the bottom as I kept adding interviews. Next week the announcement and the interviews will continue sinking on the page as we do the discussion portion of the tour. Now, thanks to you, I have a way to put them in the correct order in a single post! Thanks so much.
That is an excellent idea. From time to time I link back to my earlier messages, but I rarely offer a “roundup” post as you suggest. Looks like I will be working on that this week. Thank you!
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