I recommend using excerpts for one purpose: To drive everyone back to the blog itself.
Excerpts enable visitors to skim through for articles of interest. If we didn’t use the “excerpt” method on the blog listing page (where blogs are displayed sequentially), visitors would be scrolling down the page for days, which they simply won’t do.
Discussions and comments from your audience can’t be included on the blog listing (the page visitors see once they click on your “Blog” link/menu item) page, so if the reader stops there, they don’t see or know they can participate in the discussion spawned by the article.
We don’t want to have just article titles either, because that’s not necessarily going to compel them to read further. Instead, we do an excerpt, an image, and a link to read more after the excerpt. This keeps the blog listing page:
- More condensed
- Easier to skim through
- Compelling for people to see the title, the image, and start reading the excerpts – in other words, engaging with the article
It’s a similar situation with newsletters. People don’t want to read long newsletters. Most people don’t appreciate it, don’t like it, and don’t have time for it. Typically if they read an article in a newsletter, they’re only going to read one. We really want to drive them back to the website, back to the blog itself – not to just open the email, read whatever they’re going to read, and trash it. We want them to click through to the website, because every time they do, there’s a chance they could look someplace else or find other content that is of interest.
It’s the same with social media excerpts. We don’t want to just put the title, without an image or any description, because the title alone – even if the title is compelling, that may not inspire the reader to click through.
Note that the vast majority of blog readers will become aware of the post they are reading by either your social media postings, or your newsletter, which will have links directly to the blog post. Even a visitor coming to a post on your site via Search Engine Listing will most likely land on an individual blog post based on whatever subject they were searching for, since every post and page of a blog site gets its own Search Engine Listing.
Giving readers clear indication of the value they will receive — if they click through to the article — increases the chances that they will.
We’ve written several articles about using blogging and social media to foster Word of Mouth referrals.
Feel free to check them out at phoneBlogger.net/Blog.
We’d love to hear your feedback –
you can comment or ask questions in the “Leave a Reply” section below!
Mark Bullock
Telephone: (631) 754-0800
Email: Mark@phoneBlogger.net
Website:phoneBlogger.net
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