As a blogger, you put in a lot of energy into your posts. What happens to old posts that are published and then archived after a few weeks? Do you let all that effort go waste and just focus on new posts? You know that you can maximize your returns by optimizing your old posts, time and again. After all, your blog posts are valuable business assets.
1. Set Up A Good Archival Process
Set up a good archival process in which old posts are archived, organized, categorized and catalogued for each reference and retrieval. This will not only help you pull out an old post and link it up, but also help provide you with fresh ideas when you’re dried out.
2. Link Current Posts To Relevant Older Ones
If you use WordPress, this is easy to do, as WordPress prompts you to link an older post. Even if you don’t use WordPress, search and link relevant old posts to new ones whenever possible. This ensures that your reader will click the link to read the older post too, which increases your page views. Plus, if your reader clicks a social media share button to share your post, your old post will also get shared, which doubles your blog’s post scope.
3. Followup An Old Post With A New One
If you’ve had a successful post that got forwarded and became popular, create a follow up post after it. Link the old post and title the new one as a follow up to the old one, so that people know it. You will double the leverage out of your new post in this way.
4. Roundup All Your Old Posts On A Topic
Explore a particular topic on your blog and round up all your old posts that talk about it. Create several paragraphs in your new post describing each thought, and make sure you provide a link to the old post alongside the thought. Your new post will look like a well researched, well referenced post with a lot of intellectual value to it. You can expand your blogger outreach with this kind of post on social media.
5. Allow For Internal Searches
Put up an internal search feature based on keywords, old blog post date and title so that people can look up past blogs. These old posts may not be relevant to the one they’re reading right now but providing a good search feature allows readers to make their own connections. Plus, old blogs get read and passed around again.
6. Use The WordPress Tweet Old Posts Plugin
This plugin allows you to tweet old posts. People look for fresh content links and may not be happy to get old posts, but here’s how you can market your old posts on Twitter. Watch out for happenings, events and trends that correspond or are relevant to some old posts you’ve archived. Use the plugin to tweet those, with a one liner on why people should read them again.
7. Refresh Old Posts And Repost Them
Can you revamp an old post with a better sounding headline and a few crisply rounded sentences? Can you upload a few interesting images and make the content look new? No one remembers all of your old posts. Use this trick for when you’re dried out and post ideas are few and far in between.
8. Convert Old Posts Into Podcasts
Use a tool such as Odiogo or PodOmatic to create podcasts out of your old blog posts. This way, you can improve your content’s usability, and also ensure it’s available to a wider audience. There are several free podcast directories on which you can promote your podcasts.
9. Create Presentation Videos
Crop old posts to remove all unwanted text and record them as instructional videos. You can do this using a standard web cam, and use editing and screen capturing tools to create a presentation style video. Such videos have a great potential for driving traffic to your blog.
10. Create An E-Book Of Old Posts
Compile related posts and put them together in the form of an eBook. You can offer this eBook for free, or with a few changes and updates along with graphics and a new title, even charge readers for it. It all depends on how you use your existing content to achieve your objective.
11. Create A Blog Series
With a little tweaking and rewriting, you can take a set of old posts and put out a new series. Add bits and pieces of new content to them to make it interesting. For example, if you’ve posted not less than 10 list articles on various Top 10 aspects, create a ‘Top Top 10 Series of all Time’ blog series.
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