By Creating regular, compelling and high quality content is one of the regular struggles of bloggers, both those new to blogging and those experienced.
A lot of time and effort goes into creating the content on your blog, which means you want people to read it.
When you first start blogging you’ll find that very few people read your posts. You don’t really have a following yet, so why would anyone be reading your posts!
The bigger your following becomes, the more people who will read and share your posts. And that means the more people read it.
But the content you wrote in the beginning starts to get buried under the new posts.
Take one of my sites that is now well established in its niche. There are 1582 posts on it currently.
You can see the amount of pageviews that each post gets. Some decent numbers. But if we go back five years then you can see that the posts were getting…
…significantly less views.
But these early posts were still well written, contained useful information and would be beneficial to current followers.
The problem is, very few current followers will ever see them. Readers of blogs don’t search back hundreds of pages to check out posts. If some of the posts happen to rank in the search engines for terms someone is looking for then a few visitors may come that way. A few more may come by using the search on your site.
But most will look at the most recent blog posts and not go any further.
That means that you’ve already got an archive of content on your blog which the majority of your following won’t have read and which you can use to drive traffic.
There are two primary ways that you can do this.
1. Rewrite The Content
Take the titles of your old blog posts and simply rewrite them. Update the content, possibly give it a slightly different angle and a new title and then re-publish it.
This works very effectively but make sure you rewrite the content sufficiently to make it unique. When doing this I always try to put a new angle onto the content and then link back to the original post and cite it as the inspiration to write the new post.
2. Use Overview Posts
I love using overview posts. They’re incredibly effective at sending your readers to posts on your blog that they would never have considered before.
They also generate huge amounts of goodwill from people saying ‘Hey, I never realised this was here. Thanks for letting me know.’
Think of this as content curation using only your blog as the source of the content.
If you’re in the IM niche then you may choose to do an overview post on making the ultimate sales page.
This post can either break down the steps required to create the ultimate sales page and link to the posts which teach each step. Using this technique is the fastest way to create an overview post.
However, my preference is to write a summary of each step with key points about how to achieve it and then link to the post with complete details as a “Discover everything you need to know about XXX by reading this” approach.
That allows readers who are short on time to take action and implement the strategy straight away but come back and look into the more advanced details in the full post later on.
Whatever you choose, you should certainly be putting the content that hasn’t had many readers to good use on your blog.
What do you think?