Creating Themed Sneeze Pages to Drive Traffic and Engage Audience

Hello and welcome to episode 18 of the ProBlogger Podcast. Today is day 18 in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge and today’s challenge is a fun one. You’re going to create a sneeze page for your blog. You might be wondering what a sneeze page is and why I’m talking about sneezing. Well, partly because I’ve got a cold today, but also because it’s something that has the potential to really drive people deep into your blog, to some of those posts that you’ve written a little while ago that no longer get many views. 

It’s great for SEO and helping you to rank higher in Google. It’s helpful in keeping those first-time readers on your blog longer and increasing page views. There are many benefits to this exercise, and I hope you enjoy it. You can find the show notes, including some examples of sneeze pages at problogger.com/podcast/18.

Today is all about creating something that has the potential to have really quite huge benefits and ongoing benefits for your blog. You’re going to create what I call a sneeze page. It’s a term I invented that has been slightly grossing people out since 2009, the first time we did 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. I’m sorry if it does gross you out a little bit but the idea is really simple. It’s to create a page or a post that propels or sneezes people deep within your blog, to read your archived posts.

You might be asking why? Well, if you’ve been blogging for longer than a few months, now, you’ve got a problem. Whether you know it or not, you’ve got a problem. The problem is that you’ve invested a lot of time into creating content for your blog. Potentially, you’ve got tens. hundreds, or even thousands of blog posts in your archives. Each of these posts has had a moment of glory when it has been your most recent post on the blog. It’s been when you’ve promoted it on social media. It’s been sitting on your front page; it’s been really visible. Gradually over time, it slides down your front page, and then it disappears into your archives. For most of the posts that you’ve written, it’s rarely going to be looked at again. This happens with every single post you write.

The accumulation of that time, energy, and creativity that you’ve put into those posts is a lot. It’s a bit depressing if you think about it too much, those posts just sitting there, so today is really about getting a little bit of attention back to some of those older posts, particularly, your best ones that deserve to be seen again and again over time.

The benefits of creating a sneeze page today, the first one is that it’s going to show off your archives. It’s going to bring them back to life, lengthen their life a little if you like, and keep traffic flowing back to it, potentially for years to come. It also has a secondary benefit of being good for search engine optimization, helping your posts to rank a little higher in Google. The internal links that you have on your blog don’t really count for a lot, but they do help a touch with SEO.

The secondary benefit is that if people constantly have seen these posts, it increases the chances that they’re going to be linked to from other sites and shared on social media, which all goes into helping your posts get more traffic directly but also has indirect benefits in turn of SEO. It also helps to make your blog sticky, which basically is another gross term, I guess, in many ways, particularly, if you combine it with the sneeze analogy. It increases the chances that someone is going to stick around on your blog if they’ve been exposed to lots of different good posts on your site.

The last benefit is that it does increase the views per visit. So, every visitor who comes, instead of them viewing maybe one page, you might increase that to two or even more, which is good if you’re monetizing your blog with ads. It’s going to get your bounce rate statistic down.

There’s a variety of ways that you can create sneeze pages. I actually outlined a few different types of sneeze pages in 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook, but I don’t want to confuse you with all of them in this podcast. I just want to talk about one today. If you want to look at the others, you can grab the book.

The type I want to look at today is the themed sneeze page or post. This is where you create a page or a post that collects your best information on a single idea, category, or theme. I want to give you a couple of examples, and I’ll include links to them in the show notes for today. They’re both from Digital Photography school, my main blog.

The first one is a page. It’s a page that I titled Digital Photography Tips and Tutorials for Beginners. This page is one of the most traffic pages on our site. As I look at Google Analytics, it’s always in the top 10 posts that are being viewed. I created it in WordPress as a page as opposed to a post.

If you look at it, you’ll see that I write a really short introduction, which introduces the idea of the page. And then it’s simply a list—a number of lists, actually—that I hand-picked from links in the archives that really relate to a beginner photographer. This post, if you look around our site, is very prominently linked to in a number of places. It’s in our navigation menu. I’m constantly linking to it from other posts on the site. Pretty much, anytime I use the words “beginner tips,” it gets linked to. It gets suggested at the end of a lot of posts, too, that relate to beginners. I’m also sharing it regularly on social media. I’m constantly driving traffic to it.

If you look at the post, it’s got 30 or 40 different links to beginner tips. Anyone landing on that page from all of those different places that are promoted is potentially viewing 10, 20, 30, even more posts on our site. By the end of that, they really have gone deep into our archives. In addition to the links to posts, there’s also a couple of calls to action. We call people to subscribe to the blog, to our newsletter. People do it from this page, it’s actually the page on the site that generates the highest number of subscribes.

Also, at the end of the post or the end of the page, I include a video that promotes our course. It’s a call to action to buy something and that course highly relates to the topic, and it does convert. So, that’s one example.

The other one is also on DPS. It’s similar in some ways. It’s called 21 Settings, Techniques and Rules All New Camera Owners Should Know. This is actually a post, it’s not a page or WordPress page. It’s a post, so this actually was written and published in 2009. It’s six years old as I say this, but it’s been one of our most popular ever posts. It continues to this day to get traffic every day from Google, but also social media, partly because I share it semi-regularly on social, but also because other people do. It’s just one of those posts that just keeps on giving and giving and giving. It’s a sneeze page or a sneeze post in many ways.

As the title suggests, it summarizes 21 key things new photographers need to learn. In some ways, it’s similar to the beginner page, but for each of the key points, in this case, I’ll write a paragraph, and then include a link to another post. You can get some value from the post itself just by reading it without following any of the links, but really, to get the real benefit from the content you need to follow the links and many people do. Someone reading this post potentially ends up having viewed 21 posts on the site. That creates an impression upon people.

Again, this post gets linked to from other parts of the blog so we’re driving traffic from other posts. Also, it is something that I share semi-regularly on social media. As with the other posts, there are calls to action, to subscribe, and then we also again, promote that same video course that relates to the content on this post.

Now, both of the examples I’ve given you today are around beginner photography, which is our key audience. They’re the people who read our site the most. So, these are really relevant pages to them, but we also have others. If you look up in the navigation area, you’ll see that we link to portrait photography tips and again, that’s a sneeze page. We link to landscape photography tips as well, and there are others on the site. There are landing pages for wedding photography, for photographing babies, for posing, for portraits. There’s a whole heap of them. This is something that I use prolifically around the site. Almost all of our main categories on the site have sneeze pages somewhere.

This is your challenge for today. I want you to create a sneeze page. Now as I say, there are other types of sneeze pages that you can create. Time-related ones would be another one that I do fairly regularly, but today, I encourage you to choose a theme that you could do. So just choose the main topic of your blog or the main category of your blog.

Another way to do a themed one is to think about a frequently asked question that you get, and then create a theme page that answers that with a number of different links. Now, if you’re a new blogger and you don’t yet have a heap of archives that you could create a page with, just create a simple one. You can always come back to this page later and add more. If you only have two or three links on the topic so far, you might want to include a few links to other people’s sites as well, as we’ve talked about previously in the 31-day challenge.

The other way that you might want to do it if you’re new and you don’t have a whole heap of posts on one theme is to do a wrap-up type sneeze page, so “best of.” I know a number of blogs that do this on a quarterly basis. Every three months, they might do a look back and just do a post, “Here are our top five posts over the last three months,” or, “Five posts you might have missed in our archives.” Those posts can work as well as a sneeze page.

Just two last pieces of advice. Firstly, create this nice page today but maybe diarize to come back to it again in three months, what could you add to it. It’s good to update these pages with any new content that relates to the theme that you’ve written about.

Secondly, think today about how you’re going to drive traffic to this sneeze page. You might want to link to it from your navigation area, or your menu, or your sidebar. You might want to go and find 10 posts in your archives that you could link to the sneeze page from, so you’re driving traffic from there.

You also might want to think about how you can share this post or page on social media semi-regularly. You might want to set yourself a reminder to share it once a month on Twitter or set up some sort of a system. We use Meet Edgar to set up a library of tweets and updates for Facebook so that you can regularly share it in an automated way.

There’s a variety of ways that you can continue to drive traffic to it, but it’s important that this type of post is something that you push people to regularly. Otherwise, it’s just going to drive a little bit of traffic to some of those older posts for a few moments until that post disappears off your front page again, which is just making the problem worse. Think about how you can drive traffic to it.

I’ve included some examples of sneeze pages from my blogs at today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/18. You can find those links there. You also have the opportunity to leave a comment there and connect with others during this 31 Day Challenge. There’s been some great discussion happening on some of the previous days.

I would love today to see the sneeze pages that you’ve created. If you create more than one, feel free to share them, too. This is going to drive a little traffic to your blog, but also give you the chance to show off what you’ve done but also get a bit of feedback from other bloggers on the challenge. So please do head to problogger.com/podcast/18, where you can share that link.

Also, check out the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook, which is linked on that same page, where you can get a coupon code to get you 50% off. I’m looking forward to chatting with you tomorrow on day 19 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Tomorrow is a writing challenge, so you’re going to create a new post for your blog. I’ll chat with you then.