Day 1071: Freshly pressed

WordPress recommends five ways to get freshly pressed, as follows:

Each weekday, we select about ten new blog posts for the Freshly Pressed section of the WordPress.com homepage. These posts represent how WordPress can be used to entertain, enlighten, or inspire.

Getting promoted to Freshly Pressed is a major traffic win because WordPress.com receives a high volume of page views. And, we have a feed set up so people can subscribe to Freshly Pressed. Why do we do all this? It’s our way of saying we like you. We really like you.

So, by now you might be wondering how to get featured. It’s all about the content. Here are five bits o’ advice that will increase your chances of landing on the homepage:

1. Write unique content that’s free of bad stuff.

Each post that makes it to Freshly Pressed contains original content created by the WordPress user. Bad stuff includes (but isn’t limited to) plagiarism, hate speech, fear-mongering, adult/mature content, improperly used images that belong to someone else, spam or content that is primarily advertorial.

2. Include images or other visuals.

Although not every topic can be illustrated, we believe most blog posts can and should have a visual element. We like original images (meaning, your own), but if you don’t have any of your own and decide to use someone else’s, be sure you properly credit the original source. Video rocks, too. You may get a request from us to add an image before you are promoted to Freshly Pressed — the faster you can respond, the more likely we’ll put your post on the homepage.

3. Add tags.

We find new posts by surfing the tag pages. If you don’t use tags, we can’t find you and how sad would that be? Also, don’t use tags that are too obscure (“beauty tips from the ancient world”) but rather more common tags (“beauty,” “history”).

4. Aim for typo-free content.

We know, we’re human, too — errors happen. We recommend using our Proofreading feature before you hit “publish.” If you’ve got a few typos but we really like your post, we may ask you to fix them. In most cases, we’ll put your post on Freshly Pressed after you’ve made the changes.

5. Cap off your post with a compelling headline.

Your headline needs to stand out. Avoid swear words, excessive punctuation or vague statements. We love a clever headline, and that’s often the reason we click on your article in the first place.

Examples:
Good headline: I Won the Lottery and You Didn’t!
Bad headline: U Loserz, i WON!!!!!11!

Go Forth and Create

So, that’s it! Once you’ve been promoted, you’ll receive an email from us, and you also will notice your page views and comments increasing. Enjoy the ride! You deserve it!

As far as I can tell,  I’ve been following this advice every day since January 1, 2013.  Why, then, hasn’t WordPress said that they like me, they really like me?  Is it because my tags are too uncommon? My headlines not compelling enough?

Actually, why am I asking you?  As I recommend to people in group and individual therapy, direct communication is best.  So I suppose I should ask WordPress why I have yet to be freshly pressed, after 1070 consecutive, free-of-bad-stuff-and-typos days.

In the meantime, though,  I’d better include some images or other visuals in this post:

Which of those photos seem the most freshly pressed, to you?

And, since WordPress says “Video rocks, too,” here‘s a rocking video for today:

 

Happy  Hanukkah, Chappy Chanuka, and fresh pressings to all and to all a good day!