I got a great question over the weekend from Reonne of The Chocolate Fudge Cafe:

What’s the best way to make it so that my initial post, “Stir The Pot,” stays on the first page of my blog? How did you make it so that your findableblogs.com first page stays the same…like a website? I thought that posts automatically get archived as you continue to update and write new posts. I’d like what I said in the beginning to stay on there for at least awhile, but I want to add new material as well.

First, a confession: the only reason the front page of this blog hasn’t changed for a while (prior to this post and a change I’ll talk about in a moment) is that I haven’t written anything for a while! Between client work and an ebook I’m about to release, I’ve been a complete slacker where this blog is concerned.

If you’d rather not do the slacker thing (like Reonne, you have posts to write!), you have three options.

Use a Page as the home page

That probably sounds cryptic if you don’t understand the difference between Posts and Pages in WordPress, but a Page is designed to stick around without changing, while Posts tend to appear and disappear from the homepage, archives, and search results relative to how many other Posts you have.

You create a Page in the same way you do a Post, but instead of going to “Write” ? “Post” (or just “Write”, since “Post” is the default sub-tab), you go to “Write” ? “Page”. If you want the whole front page to stay essentially the same for a while, this is a good way to do it; just create the page here.

Once you’ve created your page, go to “Settings” ? “Reading” (”Options” ? “Reading” in pre-2.5 versions of WordPress) and switch the “Front page displays” setting to a “static page” of your choice. For instance, if I was going to change the front page of this blog to my “About” Page, I’d set it like so:

In fact, this is exactly what I’m going to do when I finish coding the new design for this site. In that case, I’ll create a special “Home” Page that will have the front page content, and that will be the first thing new visitors see.

The potential downside to this approach? Your front page is the Page you set up, not a list of entries. That might suit you just fine (like I said, that’s exactly what I’m planning on), but if you want your front page to automatically update with new posts, keep reading.

Use the WordPress time stamp magic

With WordPress, you can easily change the dates on your posts. The newest post shows up at the top of your front page (unless you’re using a very unusual theme), so all you have to do is make sure that the post you want at the top is always dated after the other posts.

This can be a bit of a pain, because you’ll need to change the date on the “top” post every time you create another post, or back-date your new posts to make them “older”, which is just confusing (if I was choosing between the two, I’d change the date on the “top” post each time).

Clearly, this isn’t as passive as the first method, but if you’re only talking about a few weeks or a few posts, it’s not that bad and accomplishes the goal nicely.

Use the sidebar

If the content you want to feature is really a kind of introduction, it might make sense to put it in the sidebar using a Widget. That way, it’s always readily available in a place where people look when they’re searching for context, but it’s not in the way of your content and doesn’t require any particular maintenance effort on your part.

All things being equal, this is probably the route I’d take in most cases, if it suits the content.

Advanced options

You can actually combine some of these ideas if you’re comfortable editing your theme. For instance, if you know your way around The Loop, you could show the content of a Page first thing, directly followed by the regular Posts. You could also just manually edit your theme’s home.php or index.php file to show a certain message before the regular content.

However, neither of these options are as easy or convenient as the previous three “out-of-the-box” options, so I tend to avoid them for short-term changes.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 2:46 pm by Sarah Lewis and is filed under Beginner, Tips, WordPress. It’s also tagged blog, blogging, chocolate, confession, Design, Design & Themes, ebook, front page, goals, initial post, planning, widgets, WordPress, Writing. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Facebook Crushes Google For Cheap Traffic

February 17th, 2010 · 10 Comments

Facebook traffic is so cheap I consider it to be free.

And it converts like crazy because it is highly targeted traffic.

If you think google sucks and you are looking for more traffic, then…

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Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Traffic Stats the A List Will Never Tell You

I’m sure many of you are longing for the day when you have an RSS following in the thousands and an Alexa Ranking in the Top 10,000. Fess up…

You are impressed by stuff like that – High PR, Massive Twitter Following, all the little signs of “wow this site must be successful” and “I bet they are making money”. (Success and making money do not necessarily go hand in hand.)

To that end I just thought some of you would like to know some real numbers.

Allyn Hane had mentioned in his comments on Blogger Illustrated that he was kinda shocked that Chris Brogan got so few comments on his posts in spite of 45K RSS readers. The same applies to Darren Rowse 165K or Brian Clark at CopyBlogger 105K and so on with the A list.

The thing most people don’t realize is that most of those RSS numbers are grossly inflated with the numbers added by Aweber Sign Ups. Download a free report or buy one of their books and you end up in the RSS number. The numbers are in no way reflective of how many people actually sign up for just reading the post feeds.

Hence don’t assume you are going to get a flood of traffic by Guest posting or racing to get a fanboy comment first in queue on one of these sites. The fact is only a very small percentage of readers ever bother to read the daily feed update, even less click over to the site in question and most readers just delete the notification in the email alert. This is reflected in just how few comments these large blogs get in relation to their “perceived” reach and influence.

Between the 3 sites they have 300K readers… and yet they manage only a 1000 members for the Problogger.com forum. A couple thousand (or so I’ve seen mentioned) for the Third Tribe Marketing thing/forum. Not really a whole lot of clout when you think about it. Those they do influence tend to be the same small group of fans that fawn over them on their sites while the rest of their readers have largely ignored their call to open their wallets.

I used to wonder just how much traffic do you need to breathe the rarefied air among Alexa’s Top 10k sites.

Well I have broken into it from time to time – most recently the other day, and the first time I did months ago I remember thinking how far off I had been regarding just how much traffic was necessary.

Click to enlarge images.

In fact the real numbers will probably surprise a lot of you.

Here is another shot of my site compared to the “Big Guys” taken today and you’ll notice that I topped Brogan’s site for a day or two.

Wanna’ know how much traffic he has?

Keep in mind that I’m talking averages and not absolutes. How well Alexa tracks and quantifies search traffic (they are getting better btw.) as compared to toolbar/social traffic could skew things. ie. maybe you rank better with much less traffic if it is heavily toolbar/social or maybe the same applies to search and not so much to the toolbar. Never the less, for our purposes I just thought some of you might be interested in some raw numbers…

But not until I hear your guesses…

Leave a comment and tell me how much traffic you think a site needs to sit 7k on Alexa.

I’ll tell you the answer after the comments

Cheers,

Griz

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