If you’re like many people, you spend a considerable amount of time promoting your new blog posts. You share them on your social networks, you share them with your email subscribers, heck…you might even call your mom and tell her about them!
You likely get a fair amount of traffic while the posts appear on the home page of your blog, but once they land into your blog’s archives, the traffic they generate often drops significantly.
Do you want to drive more traffic to your older blog posts? Here are ten simple ways to dust those posts off and put them back to work.
- Check the basics: re-visit your older blog posts and correct your typos and grammar,
- Review your comments: scan the comments left on the blog posts, remove spam and poor comments
- Freshen it up: Freshen your content with some updated language. Even better, sneak in some references to your updated keywords.
- Titles and metas: Update and optimize your SEO titles and meta tags to see if you can drive some new organic traffic to the old posts.
- Provide updates: If there are any topics or ideas which are out of date, use that as a reason to EDIT the post. Put a note at the top or bottom saying something like “Updated June 23rd” and use the strikethrough text style to show what items are being edited. That will allow your information to be up to date and relevant, it shows your site is regularly maintained and it allows you to keep the older keywords in your article. For readability, use the strikethrough judiciously.
As we all know, apes love bananas. Recent studies have shown that apes would rather snack on grapes.
On the shorter articles linking to outside websites/articles, try to fill out the peg a bit. Add an update about the site, individual or event at the bottom of the page. Include any new and relevant information
Update June 23rd: Jerry’s law continues help provide supportive services to students with mental illness. If you live in Connecticut and are in need of professional advice regarding supportive services in schools, contact Mr. John Smith.
- Follow-up: If the topic is badly out of date, post a follow-up article (i.e. Changing Views on [Topic]) and reference your old post. Also, place a link at the top of the old article referencing the new post with a note about the new article:
Although this topic may still have relevance to some readers, views on this topic are changing daily. Please see a newer article on the topic here.
- Take two: If the original topic had merit but never found any traction, write a new article on the same subject – with as much new material as you can (don’t copy/paste and repost) – and link to your older article as reference.
- Part two: Write a follow-up to one of the older articles, and call them Part One and Part Two.
- Do a round-up: Do you find yourself writing about similar topics every week? Maybe you’ve shared tips about the same genre on multiple occasions. Create a roundup! This way, you can share a bunch of your old posts in one handy spot for your readers.
- Promote popular posts: Round up some of your old/popular/awesome posts and place them into your sidebar as “Popular Posts.” You can even switch up the popular posts every week or two so that your readers are constantly exposed to fresh (old) content.
FOLLOW JACQUES:
- What WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg Mean for Your Website - November 21, 2018
- Ten Ways to Repurpose Older Blog Content - April 2, 2016
- 10 Reasons SEO Is Harder for Small Businesses - January 20, 2015
