In this mile-a-minute, microblogging world, content quickly falls off the front page of your blog and becomes buried in an ocean of archives. While having access to older posts is good, you can’t count on your visitors sorting through that information.
That’s why keeping your content fresh and “evergreen” is not only a great way to highlight old posts whose tips still ring true, but it’s also the perfect way to attract new visitors and subscribers to your blog. Here are six great ways to do just that.
Refresh an Old Post with New Information
Remember those old social marketing posts you made in 2009and 2010? How have things changed since then? Purge old posts of stale news and give them a fresh new update with new strategies, tips or ideas. Once that’s done, announce it through Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for some shiny new comments and feedback. You don’t want to overdo this, but at the same time, it’s all too easy to forget to tweet/post some older content to social networks. That’s why I like using the Sendible service to schedule posts and tweets to no more than 2 per week.
Put Your Best Content into a New Format
You could take an old series and combine posts into a free ebook that you give away on your site. PDF sharing sites like DocStoc and Scribd are a great way to get your free content out to a new audience. Plus PDFs are very mobile-friendly and great for people to read on-the-go who ordinarily might not have time to fully read your blog.
Sound, Video and Slideshows
E-Books are just one way to spread the word. You can also turn it into an audio recording using free audio software like Audacity or free video recording software like Camstudio. Take the main points of an article, overlay it with your audio “tour” and turn it into a PowerPoint slideshow. Then share that via sites like Slideshare or add it to YouTube. Don’t have PowerPoint? There are plenty of free slideshow creators online.
Share a Previous Post in Your Comment
Here’s another tactic you don’t want to overdo simply because it makes you sound like a spammer, but if you’ve read an article on another blog and genuinely feel that you could add to it with some more information THAT blog’s readers would find helpful, you can always leave a link to your older post, such as “Excellent advice! I also highlighted X more ways of using Widgets in a blog post at…” Chances are, the author won’t mind approving the comment if it truly contains useful information for their own readers.
Turn It Into a Guest Post
Many of my previous posts have reincarnated as very popular guest posts. To do this successfully, you’ll need to rework your blog post to make it mesh with your guest blog’s audience, but it’s a great way to get more traffic, comments and exposure without wracking your brain trying to come up with new ideas to write about! Keep in mind that you’ll only want to do this with some of your best work – particularly posts you’re proud of which didn’t seem to get much exposure on your own blog.
Write a “Best Of” Post that References Previous Articles
This is a great way to bring your content back to the forefront of your blog. For example, a gardening blog may have “Best Flowers to Create a Butterfly Garden”, a dog training blog might feature “Best Training Tools for Puppies 6 Months or Younger”. In this Best Of post, you can freely link to existing content elsewhere on your blog.
BONUS – Here’s a free WordPress plugin designed to promote old posts back to the front page of your blog. It selects a post to be featured randomly, and won’t work on WordPress blogs that use dates in their permalink structure (like example.com/blog/07/10/whatever-post-name) but if you’re looking for a simple way to show off your best posts, you might want to check it out.
The post 6 Easy Ways to Keep Your Blog Content Evergreen appeared first on iElectrify: Improve Website Design & Increase Conversions.