Creating Hidden Posts And Why You'd Want To
If you're building your own email list, how long are the longest emails you send out to your subscribers?
In my case, I had some very long emails that were auto posted out to my list by my autoresponder.
When I stood back and took a good look at them, I realized they were far too long.
People have short attention spans these days and there's a huge amount of things vying for that attention.
Who has the time to read a long, text-dense, email anyway?
Some of my emails were practically worthy of being blog posts in their own right!
The problem, of course, with turning them into blog posts is that anyone who visted my site would be able to read them.
So what reason would they then have for signing up to my email list?
This isn't information I want to give away for free.
I want readers to hand over their email address to get access to the information.
So what to do?
What I ended up doing was creating blog posts after all.
But these posts and pages are hidden on the blog.
You won't find them by simply visiting my blog.
You won't find them by doing a search on my blog.
You won't find them indexed in the search engines.
And you won't find them in my sitemap.
The only way to see them is to be sent the URL (web address) of the page or post.
Want to know how I did it?
It's all laid out in this post:
https://emaillistbuildingtechniques.com/how-to-get-around-se...
Recent Comments
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I just learned about hidden post/pages in bootcamp. Great way to specifically target for PPC. I can now see the value of this in email marketing as well.
Yeah, I tend to do the same, Derek. At best, I'll scan it for the salient point. I find it takes too much effort and time to wade through the waffle of long marketing emails. Informational emails I'll give a bit longer but I seldom read them in full at normal reading speed.
I believe long posts to our email list is just NOT going to be read. No one has time to read long mails these days. People are much more visual.
Yes, but some of the email series you can pick up online do contain very long emails. Turning them into hidden blog posts and writing short emails linking to those posts fixes that. Plus, because the posts are hidden and not indexed, there's no duplicate content issue to worry about.
I read your blog on it, because you mentioned it will be hidden from search engine. And then they will be ranked higher when released, could not figure that out, depending on the time frame, it could have been outdated.
If you're sending your email subscribers to a post on your blog, that's good for your site. It boosts site visitor numbers and it can help improve your site bounce rate.
If the information in a long email goes out of date, you can always edit it. However, only new subscribers to your list will see the updated email. The only way for subscribers, who already received the original outdated email, to see the updated email, would be if you send it out again as a broadcast email or you add a copy of the updated email later in your email series.
If you move the content of a long email into a hidden blog post, you can always update that blog post if it goes out of date.
Then whenever your subscribers look at that blog post, they'll always see the up-to-date version of that post.
This way your subscribers will always have access to the most current information and there's less maintenance overhead for you as the list builder.
If you send out your information in long emails, then your earliest subscribers will have those outdated emails in their Inbox rather than the updated emails (unless you send them out again).
Hope that clarifies things.
Thanks for the great information in this post, Gary.
I was not aware of using hidden posts but it certainly makes sense. As you say, people have short attention spans and long emails can turn them off. Well, that certainly applies to me!
I'm interested in the fact you changed from Yoast to All in One SEO. I've been using Yoast for a number of years and rather like the stats they give for SEO purposes. I used All in One SEO long ago, when it first was launched, I believe.
So, if I were to return to All in One SEO, I'm wondering how much work would be involved in making the change. Would each existing post require attention, or would the plugin deal with existing posts?
How much work would be involved depends on how many posts you have. If you've a lot of posts. stick with Yoast.
I originally used All In One SEO, then switched to Yoast, and now I've gone back to using All In One on new sites. It's the recommended SEO plugin here at WA, so I've gone with that.
I never really liked the XML Sitemap part of Yoast, so I always disabled that and used the separate Google XML Sitemaps plugin instead to build my sitemap.
All XML Sitemap builders should have a section where you can exclude particular posts and pages from your sitemap.
So the process of excluding hidden posts and pages is the same, whichever XML Sitemap plugin you're using.
You don't have to use All In One, but it is the easiest option to use.
But I don't think it's worth the hassle to switch your SEO plugin. I can't remember if Yoast's XML Sitemap module has an "Exclude Pages" section, but if it doesn't, then disable the module and use Google XML Sitemaps and you'll achieve the same result when keeping hidden posts & pages out of your sitemap.
Thanks Gary for your response.
I have 73 posts on my largest site so I probably won't change the SEO plugin, although many of those posts require updating. Anyway, to do or not to do is something I need to consider.
I checked Yoast and it doesn't have "Exclude Pages" so I'll take your advice and change to Google XML Sitemaps.
Many thanks. I appreciate your help.
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Thanks, this is handy information!
I've investigated this plugin further, and it has not been updated in quite some time. It hasn't been tested for Wordpress 5.
It still works, Melissa. I'm using it on my WA (Wp 5.0.3) site to hide content that's only visible to my mailing list subscribers.