Breathe New Life Into Old Blog Posts To Increase Traffic

Are your old blog posts gathering dust in your archives? This is a very common problem with many bloggers. No matter how much effort you put into a post, it will eventually be pushed down into your archives by newer blog posts. And sometimes, if those posts don't show up in search engine results, they eventually get forgotten. So all your hard work goes to waste. If only you could reuse your old posts to get the most benefit out of them. Maybe you can not reuse them as such, but with adequate SEO and some other ways, you can blow new life into them. Here is what you can do with your old posts to bring them back to life.

Link the older posts

First and foremost, link back to your older posts that are related to what you are saying in your current post. You can see that I have already done this twice in this post. Not only is this a good SEO practice, it also gives exposure to your old posts. Without this interlinking, your old posts would just be stand-alone posts which will eventually get forgotten.

Interlinking also keeps visitors engaged within your website. If a visitor is reading your post, and he finds something that you linked interesting, he might check out that link as well. Hence, the traffic will flow smoothly over and through your blog. Interlinking also shows people that you have a lot of other content on your website.

Follow up and continuation

Another good way to keep your posts lively is to make follow up posts to the old ones. These work like a continuation of the older post, with some new ideas or concepts etc. For example, we published a post about Google Panda last year in 2011 when it hit many sites across the web. After more than a year, when the next Google algorithm update came, we create a new post, or rather, a new series on Google Panda and Penguin that related to the previous year old post as well. See my point? Some of the people who were effected by Penguin this year and visited our series also visited our older post, giving it a new breath of life.

Featured and most popular posts

Another way to display your old posts is by showing them in your sidebar. Most bloggers use widgets to show their most popular posts, or featured posts. You can do this for your old posts. Take out an old post, and display it in the featured section for some time. People who like your blog will most definitely check out a post they might not have seen because it's so old. Such people welcome content that is new to them. People rarely go to your older posts manually. So you have to bring it to them.

Resource pages

A resource page is sort of a recommendations page, where you make a list of all the resources and links someone needs for something. Fro example, a resource page for WordPress beginners would include things like WordPress starting guides, plug in installation guides, plug in reviews, recommendations for themes and plug ins, downloads of some plug ins, and so on. Hence, everything related to WordPress.

Resource pages give you an excellent opportunity to bring up your old posts. You could write a few new posts, and create a whole new resource page where you can add the old posts as well. Then, you can prompt people to visit this page for guides and other stuff. If it was a WordPress page, I'd say something like "If you want any kind of help regarding WordPress, then visit this page for a complete WordPress guide" and so on.

Promote on social media

Social media is another great place to bring out your old posts. Frankly speaking, no one is generous enough to go through all the posts you ever made, even if they have been following you from the beginning. It isn't possible. So on social media, chances are that most of the people haven't seen any of your starting posts. Hence, you can cycle through your old posts again by sharing them one at a time. That way, not only will those posts get traffic, it'll also look as if you are publishing more posts than usual.

Archives page

An archive page is a bit like a resource page. But by default, your archive pages are just a list of your old posts. You can modify this page, and make it interesting. For example, you can make headings, and sort posts according to topic or category. Sometimes, visitors visit archive pages to see what oldie-goldies you have in store for them. Arrange those posts, and choose the best ones to display.

Link to post in newsletters (if you provide any)

Besides social media, you can also tell your readers about your older posts through email newsletters, if you have any. We'd recommend you start giving out one if possible. If someone has agreed to receive newsletters from you regularly, chances are that they also might be interested in content they didn't find on the front page of your blog, because it was buried deep down.

If you follow all these necessary steps, then there's no need to worry about your old posts getting rusty.

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Unknown 6/17/2012 Blogging tips , Traffic Tips