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Irrelevant posts or categories will hurt your traffic and your readers!

When I take a walk on the blogosphere, I tend to look at a blog’s categories list and the posts inside. Then I match them against the blog’s title.

If I find them pointing to the same direction, I’ll subscribe to their feed. If I see some effort to make relevant posts to the blog’s headline, I’ll enjoy receiving their updates. I mean, I don’t want an information whether “the Catholic Church is the True Church of Christ or Not” from a technology blog! If I want to, I’ll subscribe to the Pope’s blog instead .

Now, have you had irrelevant posts? What makes you do so? If you’re not sure, see if these conditions ever appear on your blogging journey, causing distracted posts:

• Increasing blog maintenance cost, utility bills, lifestyle cost, etc without blog’s raise in revenue, followed by…
• An over the usual paid review offer on things not related at all to your blog’s topic.
• Popular happenings or products having nothing to do with your blog’s niche or your area of expertise, but since everybody’s talking about it, your post joins the conversation.
• Something you find amusing, special, interesting happens in your life. Unfortunately, they have nothing to do with your blog’s purpose, which means they’re useless for your readers.

And maybe there are more problems driving you to post off-topic posts. Don’t worry! I’m not the perfect blogger either. I’ve also been persuaded by those situations to compromise my pledge to post Make Money Online tips on my blog.

So what should we do best? If I have no more options, I tried to make them least irritating for my readers. I give my readers an authorization to choose which posts they want to read.

As an initial step, I created a one-category-fits-all for my off topic posts. For example, if you have a blog about golfing, you can add a category called “Miscellaneous” or “Grunts You Don’t Wanna Read” (I think it’s too long, but you get the idea). This is where you can put your posts about your granma, your vacation, your wordpress upgrade and everything outside your golfing topic. But it’s still not good enough, since readers will be forced to read them on the main page and via feed updates. So, you alse need to…

…group them separately on the main page, so they won’t mixed up with relevant posts your golfing article. This way, readers will easily skip them if they’re not interested. Or even better,…

….you can make them available only on the blog. So, readers who subscribe to read your golfing articles, won’t get a feed update on “Your Cat Puked on the Carpet This Morning” .

Furthermore, is what I’ve done with my “Contest” section. I’ve made it invisible on the homepage and feed updates. It’s only accessible via the links on the blog. It’s kinda like a tiny-winy-itsy-bitsy bribe to visit the site, hehehe… (curious about the hack? Here are the tips..).

Finally, I hope you can find a solution to overcome your personal needs while keep providing the best for your readers.

What’s your opinion on this matter? Should irrelevant blog posts be kept away from the readers? Or should readers leave them to the authors? What would you do to your irrelevant posts?

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