Treat your old posts well! Yes, you read that right. You’ve been blogging for sometime now. And as you keep adding posts, your old posts move from the front page of your blog, further and further away from being viewed by visitors. Let me share with you why and how you can re-purpose your old blog posts.
After studying 500 posts published between 2010 and 2012, (they) found that a blog post gets 72% of its total impressions within 30 days of publication.From then on, it gets barely any traffic at all.
– A recent study byIzea and the Halverson Group
Imagine all that hard work of yours being wasted.
What can you do to bring new views to old content ? Re-purpose your old blog posts
The answer is simple. Promote. Promote. Promote.
Add Links To Old Blog Posts In Your New Posts
Relevant internal links are a smart way to let readers see old content, reducing your blog’s bounce rate (visitors moving away from your blog after they view one page). You can do this manually or if you are on the self-hosted WordPress platform (see how I used an internal link here?) use the Yoast premium plugin.
Also check for newer and more relevant external links to add to your post.
Fresh Shares On Social Media
It’s perfectly fine to plug old posts on social media. You could do this manually or with scheduling solutions like Buffer or Hootsuite. If you have a newsletter, you could include links to old posts in it too.
Feature Them On Your Blog’s Sidebar / Below Your Posts
Use a Featured Posts widget to showcase older posts. You could also show related posts at the bottom of new posts by using a plugin like LinkWithin (available for all blogging platforms).
Take Part In Throwback Thursday Parties
Plenty of bloggers or blogging groups host Throwback Thursday linky parties in which you are invited to share old posts and visit and comment on the old posts of others. If you can’t find one you like, host one yourself on your blog or your blog’s Facebook Page.
Add Pinterest Friendly Images
With Pinterest being a good source of traffic, it’s a great idea to update your old blog posts to add Pinterest friendly images and pin them. On Everyday Gyaan and here, I use a plugin called Social Warfare which apart from all its other superb features, helps me to add a Pinterest friendly image that is pulled when someone hits the Pin button. By quietly adding images to old posts and pinning them I am bringing old posts into the forefront via Pinterest.
Repurpose Your Old Posts
Old posts are a good resource to create e-books or scripts for vlogs or podcasts. You could add links to these posts in your ebook or on your vlog or podcast.
Update Posts and Republish Them
I find this especially helpful when I’m suffering from blogger’s block. I take an old post (and I have over a thousand on Everyday Gyaan) and update information and images, add a new angle or opinion, make it SEO friendly and generally ‘polish’ the post and republish it as a new post with a new date (keeping the URL the same).
Thank you for this post. It makes sense
Oh I needed this reminder. I do it sometimes and then I forget. I need to make this a part of my weekly routine – to rework some of my old posts and reshare them.
Obsessivemom recently posted…Just Wodehouse #BookBytes 18
Thank you for this post. It makes sense and I’m going to try linking relevant older posts. đ Caz x
carol hannah recently posted…Ever been bullied by colleagues in mental health?
Glad you found it useful, Carol.
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