New Life for Old Blog Posts

You have written a lot of great posts, but over time the old posts get pushed down the list and buried in the archives of your blog. These posts would be new to readers who recently discovered you, and even your long-time readers could benefit from seeing them again. They may have missed them when they were new and, even if they read them, they may not have acted on them and may not remember them. Linking from new posts to older ones can also have SEO benefits for your blog.

So how do you help readers and the search engines discover (or rediscover) those older gems? Here are a few ideas:

Refer to an old post, with a link, in a current post on a related topic. For example, if you’re blogging about sewing cute summer skirts, you could mention and link to your earlier post about choosing easy-care fabrics for casual clothes. A new post about ebook publishing can have a link to an archival post about formatting a Kindle ebook.

What’s new? Update, and link to, a post you wrote last year or two years ago and compare it to what is happening now. How has the technology changed since that post? What have you learned? Are you still doing things the same way or have you found a better way? How are your results now versus when you wrote the earlier post?

Run your greatest hits. Do you have a post that you are really proud of? Dress it up and send your readers to it. I have a lot of old posts that were published before I started using images in each post. One way to bring attention to them would be to add an image, update the content if necessary, then republish the post.

In fact, I just did this. When I discovered that my state was holding unclaimed funds for me, I dusted off a five-year-old post about finding money online. I added an image, checked and updated the links in the post, added an intro paragraph and republished the post with a new date so it would be front and center on the blog. The cool part was that I heard from lots of readers who discovered money owed to them or to family members after reading the post. Had the post remained buried in my blog, they might not have known they were owed money.

Use a plugin to bring posts to the top of the blog. There are plugins that will automatically republish old posts with a new date so they are more visible to your readers. I would be careful with anything that is automatic, but if you have a category where you know the content is evergreen, you might want to republish an old post now and then.

Showcase your old blog posts on social media. You can use the Tweet Old Posts plugin to automatically send tweets about posts that are at least ‘x’ days old. Do Facebook posts about your older blog posts. Do some of those posts have great images? Post the images to Pinterest. As long as the post is still valid (i.e., the post is informative, the information is current, readers will find it useful) there is nothing wrong with sending out links to older posts.

Both new and long-time readers will appreciate valuable content, even if it isn’t brand new.

What are your favorite ways of getting attention for older posts?

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