One of the best ways to build trust with your audience, and improve your sales is to have a high quality blog or website where you can provide great content to visitors. Blogs are a great tool that marketers can use to help bring in traffic, begin a sales funnel and generally help improve the overall business results. One of the biggest problems with blogs, however, is that after the first couple of weeks after a post is published, very few people tend to find and read it again. Occasionally someone will land on the page from a search engine, but beyond that, the content is pushed back into the archives.
The following are some effective ways to help bring more traffic to your older blog posts. This will help provide additional value to your visitors, without requiring you to produce entirely new content as frequently. In addition, by helping people to find your older posts, they will stay on your site longer, which gives you more opportunities to turn them into customers.
Related Posts Plugins
If you’re using WordPress for your blog, you can choose from any number of related posts plugins that will automatically provide links from a current post to an older one that is on a similar subject. These plugins can quickly and easily provide visitors with a logical ‘next step’ once they’ve finished reading a particular post. This will help to keep them on the site, and help you to be seen as a trusted authority regarding the subject of your site.
Recap Post
You can help bring people back around to previously published content by creating a recap post. You can publish these weekly, monthly or at any other interval you find effective. Essentially, you go through older posts, and ‘recap’ what they were about, linking to the full post. This is a great way to ensure all your visitors will see all the posts you’ve made. In addition, these posts provide excellent internal linking, which can have big benefits for your SEO efforts.
You can publish these on a fairly regular basis once you’ve got enough content on your site. Visitors will appreciate the effort, and you’ll get the benefits of having people see more of your posts when they visit your site.
Add Older Posts in the Side Bar
Most people have a side bar on their blog that has options to do a search, find content by category and even sign up for a newsletter or mailing list. Adding a plugin that will display 3-5 random older posts will help ensure people don’t forget about them. Displaying these posts will give visitors the opportunity to browse deeper into your site, and get more value from it. This will, of course, lead to a more loyal reader who will come back to your site again and again.
Post Older Content to Social Media
Taking older posts and re-publishing them to your social media accounts is a great way to drive additional traffic to your site. You can have a set day each week where you publish older content, or just work it in randomly to your social media campaigns. However you choose to do it, make sure you’re including the best posts from the past as part of your overall social media and marketing strategies.
In addition to driving the traffic to your older posts, you’ll also be seen as more active on the social media properties, which will help keep your readers engaged.
Get Creative
The bottom line with all of these strategies is that you need to get creative on how you’re promoting your old posts. Rather than simply letting them fall back into the archives, you should always be thinking of ways to breathe new life into them. Whether you follow the above suggestions, or come up with a strategy of your own, helping your visitors find your older content is a great way to improve your results.
