Blogging Without Dates - The pros, the cons and meeting in the middle

This is a guest post by Linda Dessau of ContentMasteryGuide.com

In his October 2011 post about why you no longer need a blog (in the traditional sense), John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing predicts that soon our content will "no longer be consumed in chronological fashion."

When Jim Connolly of Internet Marketing Jam explored the question of why people remove dates from their blog posts, in the end, he came to the conclusion that for his blog, the benefits far outweighed any risks.

What are the pros of blogging without dates?

What benefits did Jim Connolly see? People were spending more time on his site, and older posts were getting more views, comments and social media mentions.

His feeling was that people are sometimes turned off by seeing that a blog post is "past due," whether to them that means it's a week old, a month old or six months old. They simply won't click through to read it.

Removing the dates, he says, allows your blog post titles and topics to stand on their own merit without that filter. It puts all the focus on the content and makes it easier for your readers to find what they need.

Dateless blogging also gives you more freedom to update existing posts - simply treating them like any other page of your website.

What are the cons of blogging without dates?

"A blog is really a public chronicle of our evolution as writers, marketers and entrepreneurs. While some older content may make me cringe and wish I'd known then what I know now, I try to celebrate my learning and how far I've come." - Linda Dessau, in Is it okay to go back and edit your published blog posts?

By presenting an online journal of your evolving views, suggestions, theories, personal insights and business practices, you're inviting your readers - and prospective clients - right into your business, heart and mind.

By forcing each post to stand alone with no context of who you were when you wrote it, you remove some of the personality from your blog - some of your personality.

The best of both worlds

Consider how U.S.-based supermarket chain Wegman's organizes content on their site. They have a separate area for "fact sheet" articles about the core issues they know their customers care about.

Then there is the consistently updated Fresh Stories blog, where Wegman's staff post personal and timely food and lifestyle tips. In this article about healthy strategies for the holiday season, they reinforce a core concept from the fact sheets ("half-plate healthy"), but make it current for the season.  

Will you keep dating your blog?

If you choose to keep dating your blog, there are still several ways that readers can discover your older posts, including:

• Providing a search box
• Organizing your posts thoughtfully
• Linking to older posts from within newer posts 
• Using the Yet Another Related Posts WordPress plugin or the LinkWithin widget to automatically display more posts for your readers to browse
• Using the Tweet Old Post plugin 

What do you think? Will you keep dating your blog? Will you pull together your content into fact sheets? Or will you go completely dateless?

Linda Dessau, CPCC, is the author of Write Your Way to More Clients Online and the founder of ContentMasteryGuide.com. Check out her new free training webinar, Strategic Blogging.

Comments

[Denise Wakeman]

I removed the dates from my blog at http://denisewakeman.com a couple of months ago. To date, not one person has complained or mentioned it. I rarely look at dates on blog posts though I do understand the reason for keeping dates, especially if one's blog is news oriented, publishes multiple times per day or publishes content that changes rapidly. If you are publishing evergreen content, then I don't think it's as important.

[Maggie Anderson]

I agree Denise. More than that, in a year or two I think we will be publishing timely, valuable content that is found through social media rather than developing a list we publish to weekly or monthly (or daily, as Seth Godin does!) Do you see email lists going away?

[Linda Dessau]

Thanks Denise, it's interesting to hear the results from your own dateless blogging experiment.

[John Trosko]

Truthfully, my head is spinning at the thought of this. I've already undergone the most extensive blog make-over since I started blogging about my professional services on Typepad in 2005 (I credit Denise for making me take the plunge). I can't imagine losing the date feature. I realize now based on your post, that I may be the only one caring about that feature. I think these days, less IS more.

John aka OrganizingLA

[Linda Dessau]

Interesting, John. That seems to be the conclusion Denise came to after trying it out on her site (that her readers neither noticed nor cared). Personally, I DO care about the dates, and I'm leaving them on. At least for now...

Even though I believe that dates are the least useful (for readers) way to categorize your posts in the sidebar, I enjoy the reference they can provide for both me and the reader.

[CatsEyeWriter]

Timely topic for me. (No pun intended.) When I started, each post had a date. Then I experimented with non-dated. In the end, I went back to dates. My reason? When I wrote about my experiences with things like using social media to promote blog posts, I had information that would change over time. I didn't want to confuse my reader with a post that had old information that didn't apply anymore.

I have never used the archives in the sidebar. What motivation is it for someone to click on June 2009? It gives them not a clue about what they will find. I like tags much better, so readers can click on a topic and instantly find everything I've written about it. If I do discover more benefits to going undated, I'll consider it again. I DO, however, like the idea of have evergreen or cornerstone content, or whatever term people use for those posts that are timeless, the ones that will always apply. Haven't done that yet on my blog but I plan to.

[Linda Dessau]

Thanks for your comment, Judy. That's an important point about keeping information in context.

[LouiseBJ]

I took the dates off my blog posts a couple of months ago and haven't had any comments about it either way. My reason was to get more people to read 'older' posts that I feel still provide good information but that were possibly being regarded as dated and therefore no longer relevant.

Interestingly, a couple of months before doing this, I had reduced the number of new posts from 3 to 1 per week. This resulted in a reduction of visitors. However once the dates were taken away, visitor numbers rose again, and have evened out across the week.

Judy is so right about the importance of developing evergreen content and, having removed the dates, I'm much more conscious of not including posts about holidays or events when promoting older posts via social media.

[Linda Dessau]

Thanks for your comments, Louise!

[Elizabeth Cottrell]

What a great conversation. As a blog reader, I really want to see dates on an article about technology or product/software evaluation, because the relevance of these kinds of articles changes so quickly. But on posts about evergeen topics it doesn't matter at all. Based on the perspectives shared here, I'm going to try removing the dates from my own for awhile and see.

Since I have five major sub-topics to my overall theme, I have a second menu below my header that is based on those five categories. When you click on one, it will link to all the posts in that category. This makes it easier for someone looking for a narrower range of posts.

I really appreciate the tips on ways to help readers discover your older posts.