According to Marketing Profs, 2 million blog posts are published every single day, which are seen by a handful of readers until they get discarded into the blog post graveyard till eternity.

This is a colossal waste…..

If you are not pulling in readers to your old blog posts, you are doing a huge disservice to your ROI.

After all, spending hundreds of dollars and pouring tons of hours creating a new post and then allowing it to die seems irrational.

Irrespective of the niche you’re operating, you may face some serious problems even if you blog consistently.

Here are some questions to ponder on:

How can you ensure a constant flow of engaging new content to keep your followers engaged and reach out to prospects? How do you enhance your SEO so that your website gets the attention and traffic it deserves?

The answer is simple, and that’s to recycle old blog posts.

Most bloggers make the grave mistake of finding new topics and crafting posts around those instead of analyzing the articles they wrote in the past.

And, that’s a huge disgrace. Remember that the content you wrote a couple of years back can be your best asset.

Take it this way: Say a new reader accidentally comes across your latest blog post and falls in love with it, but hasn’t seen 99% of your old posts. Do you think they could derive the maximum possible benefit from your old articles?

Certainly………assuming they are comprehensive and informative content.

Creating new content consistently is great…

But if you fail to give attention to your old blog posts, they’ll go unnoticed in the SERPs. That’s the reason why you need to republish your old stuff and breathe a new lease of life into it. It’s a simple but effective way to boost your traffic.

A terrific example to cite in this case would be David Schneider, co-founder of Ninja Outreach, who boosted the organic traffic on his website by more than 40% simply by bringing old content back to life.

Is your new blog post more valuable than your old post?

The answer is your old post…….

But why?

Because it has matured with the passage of time! The value of your blog post isn’t the few thousand visitors you get within a day or two but hundreds of thousands of visitors that you amass from search results in the next few years. Also, your old posts have accumulated some authority through backlinks emanating over the years.

You may be a single step away from seeing a huge boost in traffic to your old content or you may lose conversions because the same content may not be updated.

Remember that your old posts hold the master key to grow your blog and take your business to an entirely new level.

I will now walk you through 5 different ways on adding life to your old posts and driving traffic to them.

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5 Crazy Techniques To Add Life To Your Obsolete Blog Posts

  1. Leverage On Email
  2. Internal Linking To Old Blog Posts
  3. Be Super Active On Quora
  4. Control Your Navigation Areas
  5. Turn Your Old Posts Into Videos

5 Crazy Techniques To Add Life To Your Obsolete Blog Posts

If you are not on the verge of blog post bankruptcy, you can save your old posts and give them a second life by following some easy suggestions as discussed below.


1. Leverage On Email

Most sources of search engine traffic are beyond your control. The good thing, however, is your social accounts and email list are all under your control.

You are in complete control of what you share, whom you share with, how you share it and when you share it.

There are 2 golden opportunities to boost traffic to your old posts with email marketing.

#1 Incorporate links in autoresponders

As a blogger, you ought to have at least one reliable autoresponder for your new email subscribers.

Your maiden emails welcome them while the following ones emphasize on your business and how you can help them (your subscribers).

Most businesses make the mistake of including links to their old posts in their autoresponder email.

You should always emphasize on the first few emails since they get the highest open rate.

A terrific example in this case would be email newsletters from James Clear, an author, photographer, weightlifter and blogger.

He has a long list of subscribers……..

The first email he sends in his autoresponder series has a free copy of his best performing blog posts, which have been compiled in an ebook, and is his main lead magnet.

A few days later, he will follow you with another email that contains the best content on his blog.

Here’s an example:

After the introductory email, he sends his subscribers a list of his best-performing content.

Below is a portion of the links:

A new subscriber will probably spend hours going through the list and pick a handful of articles, which he may read and share.

How do you find the best performing content?

An easy way to do this is to use a free tool called Shared Count.

Paste in the URLs to your old content and click the button titled “Analyze URLs.”

When you scroll down, you’ll see the engagement counts of each article on Facebook, Stumble Upon and Pinterest. Find the ones with the highest score and export them to CSV.

You can also install Buzzsumo Chrome Extension social media engagements for any web page.

#2 Include links in your sales campaign

An important reason why you should craft blog posts is to educate your readers.

You might be of the notion that you’ve educated a huge chunk of your readers in the past from an old blog post. However, a certain percentage of your list will still be in the dark as they may not have the time to read it, or maybe they are a new subscriber.

A point worth noting in this case is to provide some educational stuff to your list before going on to make a pitch.

Take Brian Dean’s roll out for his SEO course as an example. His first email in the sales campaign includes links to the most read articles that he has written in the past.

This technique not only helps you garner attention to your old blog posts, but also assists you in selling your services or products.

Once Brian educates his readers in his first email, he sums it up by briefing about the course:


2. Internal Linking To Old Blog Posts

One of the fundamentals of SEO is internal linking. This not only improves search rankings, but also enhances user experience. Internal linking helps readers steer around your blog and dig into old posts which may be of relevant to them.

Here are some ways to link to your old content:

#1 Link frequently when crafting posts

A prerogative step to efficacious anchor text link building is to get it done when you’re writing a new post.

But a word of warning here………

Never ever link for the sake of linking. You should rather be doing it as it provides value to the reader in proving or explaining a point and not because of improving your SEO.

Neil Patel of Quicksprout fame has so far written over 500 posts and in each post, you’ll find at least a dozen links to relevant articles on his blog and he uses enticing anchor texts that are hard to miss.

Below is one example:

Before finishing each new post, ensure to invest some time referring to your old posts and most importantly, see that they make sense.

#2 Build a list of your most important articles and link to your new posts

Assuming that you blog only on a handful of topics, this can be a great thing.

Directing readers to these posts will give them the best value of their time. And don’t be surprised if they slowly convert down the line.

List the different categories that you want to blog about and find old important posts that you’ll be regularly linking to. Having these links meticulously kept aside will save you effort and time.

For BloggerTipsTricks, I’ve the following categories:

  • Blogging
  • Affiliate Marketing
  • SEO
  • Social Media
  • WordPress

For each of these categories, I will record the most impressive old posts and create a list of the best performing articles.

For instance, under blogging, I might list:

11 Best Keyword Research Tools (Free and Premium)

How To Create Privacy Policy Page For Blogger And WordPress?

How To Add Keywords in Blogger Posts For Optimization?

Now when I write a new post on blogging, I will try linking to them.

#3 Add internal links to your older posts on a consistent basis.

Most blog owners follow the first 2 steps religiously but often ignore this.

A new post has very few anchor text links, and with time, you start linking to the very same post to new posts that you write.

I recommend you to schedule 5 posts that you publish and find other relevant old articles that you can link to. This not only gives your new post an instant boost in rankings, but also some amount of traffic from your old content.

Let me give you an example:

The article that you’re reading right now is about driving traffic to your old posts.

It’s sensible to include internal links in older posts that are on similar topics.

I now head over to Google and enter “Site:bloggertipstricks.com old blog posts”

This delivers a list of relevant posts on my blog.

Now I can pick some of the posts and add a link to this particular article that you’re reading right now.


3. Be Super Active On Quora

As a blogger, sometimes it can be frustrating to see no readers to your old blog posts.

You work tirelessly crafting a killer topic and then doing the research work until you roll out the post, but to no avail.

It seems like giving an epic presentation to an empty room. Irrespective of the level of insight you have to share, no one’s there to notice.

And……if you amass thousands of readers to your latest post by promoting it on several channels, the following week you need to start the process all over again.

It’s definitely exhausting……

This is when Quora comes to your rescue.

The platform is often cited as a tremendous source of content inspiration, and provides users answers on a huge range of categories.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

Right now Quora has been a great traffic source for many bloggers. In fact, Oliver Emberton, who started blogging accidentally a couple of years back, is now ruling the roost. His articles have been featured in top sites like HuffPost, Forbes and Time to name a few.

Using Quora, he built a popular blog in less than 12 months.

Now let’s get back to the core of this topic which is on repurposing your old content with Quora.

Go to your old posts and find 5 to 10 posts that have performed well in the past.

Here I will choose the article titled “How To Add Keywords in Blogger Posts For Optimization,” and then enter a similar term on Quora search bar. In this case, I will enter “How to add keywords in a blog post” and hit the Enter key.

Once done, Quora filters out the results as shown below:

Click on each of the links and see which questions can be answered by your chosen blog post.

You’ll find many but pick the relevant ones.

Next, answer the question on Quora with a few paragraphs and add your link at the bottom.

The only caution you need to exercise here is avoiding posting your links without writing anything as it may look spammy. So write a bunch of sentences that immediately attracts the attention of the reader and propels him to click on the link.

There are two advantages to this……….

One is you’ll be getting traffic from readers wanting a thorough answer. Secondly, you’ll establish yourself as a leader, and many community members will pose you similar questions down the line.


4. Control Your Navigation Areas

Some of the areas that you have greater control include your navigation areas.

There are some pretty fascinating alternatives here:

#1 Links in the sidebar

Although most blogs don’t have side bars, some do………..and it’s a brilliant place to include your old blog posts.

On Blogger Tips Tricks under the “New Articles” column, I’ve a sidebar widget that contains links to the most popular posts.

Note that the links you include here should be interesting enough, or else you’ll get a poor click-through rate. However, if you include killer posts, you’ll get a decent level of engagement and improved SEO.

Just find 10 of the best performing old blog posts and include them in the side bar.

They may not add a ton of additional subscribers, but they do certainly add up.

#2 Links in the menu

The other navigation area that most sites have is the header menu.

It’s the first thing readers see when they visit your page. And if you don’t have a sidebar, it becomes equally prominent.

If you check Darren Rose’s website, you’ll notice that he includes links to his most important content in the header section. What Darren basically does is turn his old blog posts into guides, courses and ebooks, thereby adding a new coat of polyurethane to his old posts so they shine.

There are links to some of his most popular content (Blog, eBooks, Podcast) along with “Resources.”

Always amalgamate links to your old top content and to lead gen pages since this is an invaluable space.

#3 Below the post

The last and handy option for linking to your old content is after a post.

You can find many related posts plugins for WordPress that automatically exhibits many related posts.

That said, the end of the post is an extremely valuable space, so make the most of it. It’s best to give users many options to read so that they remain on the page for a longer time.


5. Turn Your Old Posts Into Videos

Video marketing is arguably the best and powerful blogging strategy you can implement on your old blog posts to meet your online objectives-whether it’s to increase sales or drive more traffic.

According to a recent report by HubSpot, 97% of marketers claim that videos help increase understanding of their products and services, with 69% being convinced to make a purchase after watching a video.

Based on a report from Cisco, over 82% of all website traffic will come from videos by 2020.

So what’s stopping you?

Many bloggers are not comfortable with the idea of turning written content into a video. It takes time to learn to create a video and can easily cost thousands of dollars if you hire someone to do the job for you.

Furthermore, getting your face in front of the glaring camera is a big NO to many. As a result, you sit this one out. But you will be missing on a lot of goodies if you don’t have videos on your website.

In the next few years, you will be forced to deliver your content through videos.

Why?

Because videos will be the primary way for people to learn, interact, and shop online.

How to convert your old blog posts into videos?

Lumen 5 is a brilliant software that allows you turn your posts into animated and informative videos, which you can share on your social channels.

Once you sign up with a free account, you get two options for importing the content from your post-either paste your text manually or type in the link to your post. Once you do this, AI bots of the software will pull the images and text from there.

On the next screen, you’ll find the text of your post on the left, with the video story board being placed on the right. The title of the post appears in a box at the top as shown below:

Now for creating your video story board, you can add the text manually by clicking the “+” button and typing in your text. You can also copy sentences from the left and paste it on the storyboard.

Drag the move icon to change the order on the storyboard.

Lumen 5 insists on using not more than 120 characters in each box. You can click on the box to edit the text or delete characters.

You also have the alternative to upload images for the video. Note that they need to be at least 500 x 500 pixels or larger, and in PNG, GIF, or JPG format. If you don’t have images of that size, you can use free stock images from sites like Pexels and Unsplash.

There are many benefits of using Lumen 5. For example, it suggests relevant images for the video, fills the background completely, has a number of options for editing the text, and has 9 different layout positions for placement. If your slide has a long sentence, the tool will automatically divide the sentence into many text boxes, which are then animated one after the other.

To add an audio track to the video, click on the Music tab and the drop-down Mood list. Pick the type of music you want to include and click on apply.

If you don’t want to add music, you can keep the section blank.

After you’ve finished creating the video, click on Continue at the top of the screen. This allows you to see a preview of your video.

Click Continue Editing if you want to fix anything. But if you are satisfied, hit the Publish button. You will receive an email once it’s published and can download it as an .mp4 file to share it on your website and social channels.


Over To You

By now, I hope you realize the importance of your old blog posts.

If you have ever invested in a property or house, you wouldn’t let it sit there idle. You would actively try to enhance its value by maintaining it well. Same goes for your old blog posts.

If you use the 5 tips mentioned in this post, you’ll see a fairly decent growth in overall traffic and conversions.

What are the other techniques you use to add life to your old blog posts? I would like to hear them in the comments section below.

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