How To Enable Expandable Post Summaries On Your Blogger Blog

Posted on November 9, 2007
Filed Under Blogger Platform Tips |

I have decided to try Expandable Post Summaries on Monetize Your Blog. An Expandable Post Summary allows you to display an arbitrary amount of text (say a paragraph or two) from the beginning of each article, followed by a link which takes a reader to the full article. These teasers are shown only on the main page of your blog.

My blog is published using Google’s Blogger platform, which unfortunately does not support Expandable Post Summaries (Wordpress users may begin gloating now). But, if you are willing to play around with your template a little, you can enable this feature on your blogger blog. You should also consider how your readers may react to you enabling this feature - but I will come to that later. Since this is my first post using Expandable Post Summaries, I had better see if it works (for anyone reading this article through rss or the email newsletter, this marks the end of the post summary - visit http://monetize-your-blog.blogspot.com to see whether it worked).

From this point on, the article should only be visible if you clicked on the post’s permalink. Intructions for how to enable Expandable Post Summaries can be found in the following Blogger Help Article. Before trying it out, be aware there are 2 main shortcomings of the method suggested.

First, the Read more! link will appear at the bottom of every new post, even if you want to write a short post with no summary. The workaround is to put the following text at the end of your post (thanks to SHORT for providing this solution in the comments on this article).

<span class="fullpost"></span">

The other problem is that a Read more! link will be added to the bottom of every existing post even though they are being displayed in full. The only way around this seems to be editing all of your old posts to break them into summary and full post parts - not a job I would like to take on.

Why would you want to enable Expandable Post Summaries?

1. The first and possibly best reason to enable this feature is to allow a reader to scan more of your articles when they arrive at the main page of your blog. This is especially true if you are inclined to write longer posts. By just displaying the first couple of paragraphs, you will be able to fit many more posts on your main page - and give yourself a greater chance of catching the eye of the reader with an interesting post. Your main page will also look neater without large slabs of text.

2. Next, by encouraging the reader to click to continue reading, you can better gauge the level of interest in your writing. Without Expandable Post Summaries, you don’t know whether a reader who only visited your main page, read all of your posts with vigor, or just left your blog immediately. For example, you may have noticed in your traffic statistics, that most visitors only have one page load - the main page. By enabling Expandable Post Summaries you can experiment with your writing style to see what works best in enticing a visitor to read an entire post.

3. The final reason is all about profit (the title of this blog is Monetize Your Blog after all…). The more of your blog pages a reader visits, the greater the chance they will spot a PPC ad or affiliate product they like, resulting in PPC revenue or affiliate sales.

So why wouldn’t you want to enable Expandable Post Summaries?

The downside is that you may annoy your readers, especially if you have an established following. They may think you are trying to manipulate their behavior for forcing them to visit more of the pages on your site.

However, on balance, I think Expandable Post Summaries are worth a try. The main reason I like them is for the clean user friendly appearance they give your blog.

Technorati Tags: blogger platform, blogspot, expandable post summaries




Keep up to date with the latest articles at Monetize Your Blog. Subscribe via rss for free.

Related Articles


Comments

3 Responses to “How To Enable Expandable Post Summaries On Your Blogger Blog”

  1. John W. Furst on December 5th, 2007 8:39 am

    Thanks you for submitting your article to my latest edition of “Webmaster Articles” Blog Carnival. It was my pleasure to include it.

    Thanks
    Yours John W. Furst
    E-Biz Booster Blog

  2. ROHIT on December 12th, 2007 11:46 am

    please give me a detail on read more and how we
    link to other blogger in blogger please give me a
    detail on it because you do many experiment on it
    in your monetizeyourblog.blogspot.com so please
    give me detail on it via email ..

  3. Zakaria Chowdhury on January 10th, 2008 11:10 am

    Thanks for you help. But it is a manual process. What about existing posts? You need to change html into your previous posts manually.

    In the following link you will find a tutorial about creating expandable post summary. I have created a javascript function which makes summary automatically. So you do not need to change html manually.

    http://itsafun.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogger-tutorial-create-expandable-post.html

Leave a Reply