Bloggers publish new posts, share them widely once. They sit quite.
That’s no good.
Updating and resharing old blog posts is as important as updating your blog with fresh content daily. By promoting our old blog posts, you are missing a huge part of traffic and potential readers for our blog. The loyal readership and followers for your blog increase day by day. By not promoting old posts, you are missing the opportunity of new followers of your blog reading your old, evergreen and valuable posts.
Before promoting your old blog posts, I advise you update your old posts with fresh information and proofread your old post again. Here’s the guide on updating your old posts. By updating your old posts, you attract a good amount of organic traffic, and when you promote it, people tend to get great value out of it. Add the latest information, graphics and make sure that the “last updated date” has been changed. Make sure that the post, you are sharing is timeless, and relevant till date.
Once you update your old blog posts, now you are ready to promote them.
So, how to promote your old posts effectively?
Share them on social media
Reshare your old posts on social media sites like Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter and LinkedIn. While sharing it, do mention that you’ve updated your old post with new information.
Add an ‘updated’, or ‘revised’ label. Let your readers know that you are sharing the updated old post. With this, the chances of your audience liking, commenting and sharing your social media post will be higher.
While sharing remember to include a meaningful description, add hashtags, and remove the long URL after the URL preview has been generated. Use good visuals to entice the readers.
You may make use of plugins like Revive Old Post plugin, to automate the process. Make sure to be careful while using these automated tools.
If you prefer to do it manually, dedicate at least 15 minutes daily to share your posts on Facebook groups, Google Plus, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Link to old posts in your new blog posts
When you publish new blog posts on your blog, link to your old posts. By this, you are telling Google that your old post is still relevant and is not out of date.
Interlinking your blog post like this also gives you great SEO benefits. It boosts the authority of your entire domain. It increases the ranking power of your blog.
Readers when reading your newly published blog posts, tend to read the old blog post that you’ve linked. It thus sends some user interaction signals to Google. And thus, your search ranking may increase.
You may also link to these old posts with the help of related post section or linking to them at last of your new posts.
Help at least one person daily
There are many of the newbies posting questions on forums, Q&A sites and social media groups. Try to help at least a single person daily. This helps you build up your online reputation and expertise.
Include links to your posts if needed. So that, the whole stream of traffic may flow to your old post.
On Q&A sites like Quora, you can include links to your posts by just pasting the URL. In forums, you can make use of signatures to showcase your post below your every answer.
Search for relevant discussions happening around the web. Participate in them. Acquire new knowledge and also traffic.
Make use of sticky posts feature
Bloggers tend to under-utilize the sticky post feature. When you massively update any old post, stick it top the top of your homepage. By this, your post gets more page views and it boosts SEO.
It’s also a great idea to stick your most popular blog post periodically. As it would, spike your traffic greatly.
Create roundup or ‘best of’ posts
Create a post like ‘top 10 posts this month’ or ‘top 21 posts from 2015’, publish and promote it widely. Include the links to your old posts. It increases the traffic drastically to your old posts.
Above is the example roundup post from ProBlogger. The post is visually attractive as they have included the feature images of all of their popular posts in a single post.
No reader will miss the chance of reading all your popular posts of the year in one post. These type of posts receive more interaction, shares and returns great value.
Email your list
Shoot newsletters to your subscribers about the old blog post of yours. Make sure you use the different email subject than that of the first newsletter. Or else you smell like a spammer.
Or.
The alternative method is to include links to your old posts within your new newsletters, naturally.
By this, you extract some more traffic to your old blog posts. Don’t repeat this, unless your old posts are updated significantly with new information.
Comment on other blogs
Including the blog URL in the body of the comment, may put in the naughty list of commenters.
What I’m telling is that, instead of linking to your homepage, link out to one of your old post in comment ‘homepage URL’ section.
Make sure that your comment is insightful, so that it entices the audience to click on your link. What you’ve commented is the one that decides the amount of traffic you get back to your post.
Add ‘recently updated posts’ widget
This works great.
Instead of including widgets like recent posts, popular posts, and others. Try to include a widget that showcases all the blog posts you updated recently.
By this, you’ll get sudden traffic boost to the posts that you recently updated.
Widget
Plugin: Recently updated posts widget
For any reason, if you cannot use this, there are other alternatives like using random posts widget in your blog.
Repurpose the old posts
I already have a blog post on this Definitive Guide to Content Repurposing Process [With Infographic].
Repurposing old posts is of great importance.
You may transform your post to slides, then to infographics and submit them to slide sharing sites and infographic directories.
You can use the same infographics to build backlinks to your site by offering your readers the embed code. Here’s an excellent post by MonitorBacklinks@ How To Build Quality Backlinks With Infographics.
You can also create videos out of your blog posts and share them YouTube, Vimeo and others.
Link to them in guest posts
If you regularly write on other posts. There’s an opportunity for you. Instead of linking to your homepage, link out to one of your old post in author bio section.
You can also do the same for interviews, experts posts.
If you are in any other link building campaigns, try to build backlinks to the recently updated old post as it would send “still relevant” signal to Google.
Final words
Make use of every opportunity you get to promote old posts. They deserve it. Remeber the effort you put in while creating your old posts.
If you have any other tips to promote old posts, do share them in the comment section.
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