Show off Your Upcoming Posts to Spark Interest

I’ve long wanted to be able to show my visitors the upcoming tutorials on my site so that they might be intrigued enough to subscribe to my feed or subscribe to my newsletter so that they don’t miss out on them.

All the tutorials I had seen, didn’t cover it quite the way I wanted, so I set about creating my own code for it.

I wanted it to display the next three posts that were to be published on my site. Most of the tutorials I had seen showed the three posts that had the latest scheduled post date, meaning that other posts would be posted before any of those were ever posted.

So if you want to create a little widget that displays the upcoming stories on your blog that are next to be published, use the following code:

<?php
$my_query = new WP_Query('post_status=future&order=ASC&showposts=3');
if ($my_query->have_posts()) {
    while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
        $do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>
        <ul><li><?php the_title(); ?></li></ul>
    <?php endwhile;
}
?>

You can modify it a little to your exact needs. For example, to change the number of posts displayed, just change the bit that says showposts=3.

Now you just need to drop it into sidebar.php (or wherever else you want to display it) and add a little styling to make it look just right.

Where have you ended up using this little trick? Have you seen an increase in sign-up rates?