In a world where bloggers are writing posts every month, week, and even day, posts get old – fast.
How do you
drive traffic to your old posts?
This post will show you
how to dust the cobwebs off your older posts and bring new life (and traffic) to them, right now.
There’s one caveat: Your old post needs to be
an “anchor” post (also called “evergreen”), meaning it is still relevant despite being an old resource. Sure, it may require some updated sources and content, but for the most part, it’s just as relevant as it was the day you wrote it.
Here goes nothing!
Recycling “Anchor” Posts on Social Media
When you first write a post, you share it on social media, right? But, did you share it again… and again?
Just because you shared something once doesn’t mean you can’t share it again. You’ll gain followers over time. New people will see the post who may not have been online when you first sent that tweet. Perhaps a different headline entices someone to read a post they didn’t originally click on.
CoSchedule
does this well with their content:
As you can see, they shared the same article nine times over a single week, for a total of 70 unique link clicks.
But don’t just stop there! Continue to schedule the post once a month, every month, for the rest of the year. Heck, keep going every other month in year two, and so on.
Just be sure to update the post before you share it again – perhaps give it a refresher every six months or so. That way, the content stays relevant and will continue to be useful.
Related Reading: Scheduling Software – good idea or not?
Cross-Linking to Your Old Posts
The second strategy I want to talk about is cross-linking (also referred to as “internal linking”).
Cross-linking means linking to one of your blog posts from another one of your blog posts. In visual form, it looks like this:
Every one of the lines represents a link from one page to another. Of course, the more posts you have, the more complicated this web gets – but the theory stays the same:
Whenever you write a post, look for opportunities to link back to your other, older posts.
This strategy increases traffic to those older pages, visitor’s engagement with your content, and time spent on your site!
Conclusion
Recycling your best content to be shared over and over again, and linking internally to your older posts, is a super easy and effective way to
get more traffic and engagement. It’s your blog’s low-hanging fruit!
Not only will these strategies
improve your blog traffic and engagement, but they’ll also give you a boost in
SEO by making it easier for Google’s bots to crawl your website (meaning it makes it easier for Google to rank you in search results.)
Now I want to hear from you! What are your best strategies from breathing life into an old blog post? What’s worked well for you, and what hasn’t worked well? Leave a comment below!
As always, don’t forget to share this post if you liked it!
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