One of the best aspects of blogging is that old blog posts can continue to work for you.
Unlike social media, your old blog posts can live forever. Some of my most successful blog posts were written 5+ years ago.
I like videos on YouTube and podcasts on various podcast platforms as well for the same reason.
It’s really difficult for people to find and discover old social media posts. Thanks to search, it’s relatively easy to discover old blog posts, YouTube videos and podcast episodes.
It’s similar to compounding interest with saving money. You don’t just benefit from what you do today, but also from the combined efforts from years past.
The first step is to create blog posts that are relevant today and likely relevant in the future. That’s not necessarily easy, but a good first step is to avoid writing about news-type information.
Now, let’s say you’ve been blogging for a few years. Here are some ways to put your old blog posts to work beyond any traffic they’re bringing you from search.
1. Snippet System for Social Sharing
A good practice to get into is breaking down each of your blog posts into snippets. Snippets you can share on social media that are separate from just sharing the title of the post along with the link and maybe a few hashtags.
It’s good to share new posts with the title and link. And you can do that with old posts too. In fact, that’s one of the best ways to use your old posts.
But social channels are designed to keep their users on the channel. Some don’t allow links and others don’t really show posts with links in the main feeds. And that’s fine.
By taking out snippets from your blog posts you can post natively on your social channels and earn the attention on the channel that can increase your authority, which leads to more traffic by people clicking on your profile link or by people leaving the social channel for Google and searching for your name or brand.
2. Email Content
Email continues to be a great way to market a business. However, you need valuable content in order to get people to subscribe. A great strategy for providing ongoing value is to pull snippets from your blog archives.
Some businesses we’ve worked with will use a snippet and then link to a post for an email. Some will identify a theme for their email and pull snippets from a few old posts. Some won’t even include the links. They’ll pull snippets and leave them as standalone content to provide value right in the email.
3. Video & Podcasting Content
You can easily repurpose blog content into video and podcasting content. More bloggers are now simply reading their blog posts once they’ve written them and publishing the audio on a podcast channel like Anchor.
So go further and take a blog post and use it to create a script for a video demonstration that can work well on YouTube.
4. Consistent Internal Linking
Once you write a new post, search your archives for old content to link to. If you have a search function on your blog you can search that way. If you’re using categories and tags you can click on those on your blog to find related posts that you can link to.
You can also use Google to search for content on your site by typing this into the search bar:
site:yoursite.com “content you’re looking for”
Here is an example:
Consistently linking back to old posts gives readers of current posts an easier way to discover new, related content that will give them added value.
5. Content Updating
You can also go back and update your old posts to add more valuable information. Some posts won’t need updating, but others often benefit from a little updating. Perhaps you provided a great how-to blog post, but after a few years you would add some information or change some information. Those are good posts to update especially if they’re bringing in traffic now through search.
Conclusion
Old blog posts will often provide value in the form of traffic to your site even if you do nothing. However, if you’re looking for even more, a little work can go a long way. The methods here are great processes you can put in place within your marketing strategy to bring even more traffic and value to your business.