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Blogging : what about your old posts?
July 13th, 2008How do you treat your old articles? Do you just forget about them because they simply bring you a couple of visitors per day? In the web business, you always have to make the most out of what you have and dead articles is money sleeping.
So let say you have a 100 posts blog and one post is briging you 75% of your traffic which is 750 visitors per day. So you have 99 posts getting only 25% of your traffic, how weird is that? It’s a very common situation among bloggers because each blog seems to have a “master” post. unfortunately, we tend to concentrate too much on that master post and forget about the older ones. Well, that’s a good way of loosing money.
Here’s what you can do:
- On one of your “master” post, put a little something like: “If you liked this article, you might also like ‘x article’. So, you take most of your traffic and redirect that traffic on a similar post. This way, some people will consult two pages of your site, you double your advertisers exposure and you also double your chances of getting a new reader.
- Write your own personal TOP 5,10,20,25, etc. It’s not because some articles are not popular that they are not good enough. Redirect your readers to great articles they don’t know about. Maybe one of that reader is a blogger who will talk about one of your newly discovered post on his blog.
- Put a “most popular” or “personal top 5″ in one of your sidebar. People like to read the best content of a website or what’s really popular.
There are hundreds of other tricks you can use to resurect your old posts, just be creative! The important thing is not to forget about them.
10 Responses to “Blogging : what about your old posts?”
What do you think?
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It might be a better idea to point out your _related_ articles (is that what you meant by “similar”?). A lot of blogs have plugins that do this automatically, but if you had pick this “further reading” material, it will likely work much better (since generic keyword match used doesn’t actually work that well).
Personally I find once you have enough of those “old articles”, you can often reference your own material while writing new posts.
Protip: go back to those old pillar articles with solid search engine traffic and edit in the references to your _newer_ posts from the body of the article.
Totally agree with that Tony and yes I meant “related” with “similar. It’s also a good idea to reference your newer posts from your older ones.
Many of us are so focused on publishing new things we forget the points you make about older gems! Also I’m still getting used to everything being pushed down and archived, makes it easier to forget your own posts. I plan to go back and recycle some articles with new perspective or change of heart based on my extensive 3 months of blogging.
This definitely is a good idea!
I like to use related posts at the end of my articles. I also like to link to older posts when writing new ones. The more ways you can have your reader engaged with your site the better.
The more content you can expose them to the better. You want to keep them around as long as possible, or at least make it so they will want to come back.
Yes exactly, related posts are a great way to improve your bounce rate and get user to really know your website. This way they don’t make an opinion of you based on one article, you kind of get a second chance. This is something I’ll try to implement for this blog…
Linking back with inbounb links is really important i do a few posts without any inbound links but then als submit many with a vast amount of them reffing to previous posts for more information.
I think it is important to do that becuase you can make a visitor and return visitor by giving them link to other useful sources on your blog.
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great idea mate,,,,I just forgot about y old posts.
great tips, thnx alot… i only used for the related posts….
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This is a great tip. A few years ago this was also know as “stickiness”.