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No.
What? I don't need to slave away 3 - 5 days a week to provide new content on my blog? I must have read that wrong. Surely you're not serious!
No, you read that correctly. Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't continue striving to bring great, fresh content for your blog. However, everyone needs a break once in a while and the great majority of the content you have already creating for your site does not have an expiration date.
Some Facts:
The top viewed post on my blog in the past 7 days is a guest post from February. It has garnered 610 new page views in the last 7 days.
In the last 24 hours the 3rd most viewed post is from July, receiving 52 new views.
How can you capitalize on this time saving traffic driver?
Highlight older posts. With my new template, I added the sidebar gadget - Popular Posts. Typically it is showing the top 5 posts from the past 7 days. Right now though I'm displaying the most popular posts of all time. I can also set it to the top posts for the past 30 days. I choose which ever option that gives a different collection of posts to highlight.
I also tweet about older posts. Some times it is to highlight an older post that's getting new views or a popular post. If a book I've featured/reviewed or an author I've hosted is in the news - won an award or has a new book coming out, then I will let my fans know about the posts I have done.
I also feature popular posts in my monthly newsletter.
Why does it work?
Like I said, most of your content does not have an expiration date. Also you should be getting new fans and while we would like to believe they go through all our old posts when they discover our blog they don't. I have something like 400 posts it's just not feasible. Instead, I direct them to posts of interest. I picked up about 700 new Facebook fans in the past month and probably another 100 or so Twitter followers (with all the follow, unfollow, only to follow again I have trouble determining how many truly new followers I get). That is a slew of new people who haven't read my previous posts.
Books rarely become outdated.
If you are looking for a break or going on a vacation and don't want your traffic to suffer, then consider directing your readers to older content. You can make old content new by doing a short update post - perhaps a new edition is available or the author has a new book in the series coming out. Write up the update as a new post then link back to the old post (s) - the review, guest post, or book feature.
Your Challenge: Try posting to Facebook or tweeting the link to 1 older post a week and see what it does for your readership.
Posts
Great post and a good idea for many to follow.
ReplyDeleteGreat tips. 30% of our traffic is now to older posts via search engines. I'm sure we could get even more if we tweeted out some of the older ones too - great suggestion. I'm not a fan of plugins that manually tweet posts - too generic - but I love your idea of tying it in with something like a new release.
ReplyDeleteI noticed your Popular Posts in the sidebar. Very eye-catching!
ReplyDelete