How to drive traffic to old blog posts

There is nothing worse than knowing you have great blog content on your site, but that no one is reading it.

If your blog content is a central part of your marketing strategy then it is vital that you continue to drive traffic to your new blog posts, as well as your old posts.

Keep on reading to find out how you can drive traffic to old blog posts.

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SHARE ON SOCIAL

This might seem very obvious, but time and time again I see business owners who will share a blog post when it is new and never share it again. If you have an engaged social media following then you definitely should be sharing your blog posts more than one.

Most business owners worry about sharing the same thing because they think it will annoy people. However, depending on the platform only x% will have seen the first post and if you give enough of a break between posting the likelihood is even if they’ve read it before they won’t get angry about you resharing.

When it comes to resharing there are two approaches:

Identify blog posts that are seasonal and share them when they are relevant again. For example, I have a blog post called New Year Checklist for small and solo business owners (You can read the full post here). This is relevant to post in either December or January and as long as I check that I’m still happy with what I’ve written I can continue to share this year after year.
Reshare your evergreen content continuously Whereas some content is timely some content is evergreen (meaning it is always relevant). For evergreen content, you don’t have to worry about when it is shared and as a result, you can decide a frequency for how often you want to post your previous evergreen posts and then set that up in a social media scheduler. You can do this manually (this is definitely a task to batch) or you can use a social media scheduler like Recurpost or MeetEdgar where you create libraries of content and a schedule and then the scheduler will decide what to pull from the library and post at the predetermined time slot.

LINK TO OLD BLOG POSTS IN YOUR NEW BLOG POST

Hopefully, you are still creating a consistent stream of new blog posts. If so, you should also be thinking of whether you have old blog posts that you could link to.

For example, if I’m writing about a specific type of marketing then I’ll always search for other blog posts I’ve written about that type of marketing and see if it is relevant to link to them too.

You could also create a section at the bottom of your blog that says if you enjoyed this blog post then you might be interested in X. I use this technique for book reviews. At the end, I’ll highlight other books which are covering a similar topic or aimed at a similar reader and if I’ve reviewed a book I’m recommending I’ll add a link in too.

CREATE A POPULAR POSTS SECTION

As you create more and more blog posts it will become increasingly important to highlight your popular posts. Now technically to choose your popular posts you should head into your Google Analytics and check which blog posts have received the most views. However, as a business owner, you don’t have to go purely by the stats. It could be that you have a post in your popular posts that is now no longer relevant to your business and therefore you don’t want to highlight. Also, you may have a blog post that is a part of your sales funnel and you decide to add that into your popular posts section.

Find out more about using blog posts to fill an evergreen sales funnel here.

Once you’ve decided what blog posts are going to be included in your popular post you then will need to work out where to share your popular posts on your website. Some common options are:

Sidebar
Homepage (further down)
Blog main page

IMPROVE THE SEO OF THE BLOG POST

If you have a specific blog post that you want to drive more traffic to it would be worth checking how it is performing from a search perspective. Go into your Google Analytics and see what percentage of traffic has come from search and how that compares to your other blog posts. If the percentage is lower than the majority of your blog posts then it would be worth investing some time to improve the SEO of the blog post.

SHARE YOUR OLD BLOG POSTS IN CURRENT EMAILS

If you are using email marketing in your business then there is no reason you can’t write an email that tells people to read one of your old blog posts You don’t need to even highlight the fact that it is an old blog post.

There are 2 ways you can use this tactic:

Automated email sequences – If you are using automated email sequences see if there is anywhere that it is logical to include some of your old blog posts.
Regular newsletter updates – If you are sending regular newsletter updates when you are doing your content planning see if you can direct people to old blog posts. Seasonal blog posts are a great option to push out via newsletter as they seem timely even when, in fact, they are old.

There you go! Now you know how to drive traffic to old blog posts.

Hopefully, you can see a few different tactics that you can use in your business. With just a bit of forward planning and some consideration, you can really ensure that the time and effort you put into old blog posts isn’t for nothing.

As the volume of content grows you need to get more strategic about the future content you create and about how you are making the most of everything you’ve already created.

If content is a central part of your marketing then it is essential to have a proper content marketing strategy.

I’m passionate about content marketing and how by planning ahead and being strategic you can use it to make more sales and grow your business. That’s why I run Intensive Strategy Days. In an Intensive Strategy Day, I’ll review your analytics, ensure you know what old content should be driving traffic to and helping you plan your content for the future (up to a year ahead).

You can find out more about an Intensive Strategy Day and book one here.