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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