Another blogging tip, writing timeless articles
It’s already a while ago Daniel, the author of ‘DailyBlogTips‘, wrote his article ‘5 tips for writing timeless articles‘, covering 5 tips on how to make your articles interesting to your visitors, no matter when they read it. These tips main at ways to change your writing style as well as your weblog template in order to remove all the links towards specific days or times.
I must say this article was quite interesting; if you manage to write a couple of ‘big hits’ in a timeless way, you could theorethically continue to gain profit of it, often being backlinks and visitors, the simple reason of that is bloggers often only write about recent articles, if you take away all things that might show when you wrote it or how old it is you’ll take away this ‘resistor’.
His first tip is, of course, taking away words that “bring the idea of time”, such as ‘now’, ‘yesterday’, ‘this month’ and tons of others. I think this might be one of the hardest steps, as it does require you to think more before you write; an article with notations of time make it easier to read, especially if it’s not too easy or about various events.
Tip #2 is putting your dates at the bottom of a post, as “many readers get discouraged to read a certain post if they see that it was written long ago”, this somewhat matches the point I described earlier; bloggers like fresh content. I followed this tip myself already, even though it might not be very interesting as I personally write a lot of content for this weblog, I doubt a day will show up where I don’t have a fresh post for a couple of days. I was also surprised to see Daniel suggesting this without doing so on his own blog, even though he does seem to update his weblog frequently it might be a smart move, but instead he still uses the ‘old fashioned’ semi-default Wordpress look.
Number 3 is a bit surprising to me though; it simply states, “Get rid of the calendar”. Daniel writes that it’s not useful to show a calendar if the articles you write aren’t exactly pinned to a date. He might be right, if I take a look at my calendar I see every day highlighted, my statistics don’t report any clicks on it so I guess it’s not really a worthy addition. On the other side it does somewhat show this blog is update frequently, which might be a positive thing for future RSS-feed subscribers. I’m not sure whether you shouldfollow this tip or not, I suppose you can get rid of it if you’re lacking space, but elsewise I wouldn’t advise it.
Tip #4 is also a bit controversial; “Get rid of the monthly archives”. I’m quite sure it doesn’t add much of a value to the blog, however, it does make it easier to find back specific articles without having to actually search for them, for whatever reason. It wont hurt to remove them, but sadly a lot of websites do find these useful, simply to check how old your blog is and how often you’ve posted in the past. My advice: remove if you can.
The last part of the article, ‘When blogging about news or current events make sure to add value’, surely is important and interesting, but doesn’t quite match with the reast of the article; when you write about news and current evens it’s almost impossible to avoid dating of this information. But, as I wrote, it’s an important thing to keep in your mind; without added value there isn’t much of a point in blogging about news – for news you can check out CNN, Al Jazeerah or BBC – middle those sources out and you’re awfully close to the truth.
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