One of the negative things with blogging is that blogging is mostly focused on new material. You must create new content regularly in a consistent blog posting schedule to keep your readers coming back, commenting on your articles, sharing it to friends.
When your article goes down your main page or goes on the second page, it will stop receiving visitors, it will stop getting comments and in case you monetized the post with some personal recommendation it will stop sending traffic and revenue.
Increase the lifetime of your blog articles
I’m currently trying to increase the lifetime of an article as I believe it gives a better and fuller experience if a first-time visitor has access to some of the older content as well, and not only the most recent posts. I do following things at the moment:
- Featuring a larger number of articles on my front page. I currently have 18 articles on my front page. I wouldn’t recommend having 18 full articles on the front page normally as it will slow down the page and decrease the usability, but Thesis theme makes it so easy to feature a large number of posts with the short teaser previews.
- Linking to my old articles from my new articles. I am doing this regularly. For example at the end of the article I sometimes write a paragraph about what to do next where I suggest what posts to read next. When the reader has finished reading, it is a nice opportunity to suggest something new to read.
- Having a static page that lists all my articles. My create a blog step-by-step page lists majority of articles I have written on this blog. I have collected them in topic-by-topic list and given it a major spot in my menu.
- Creating the most popular articles list in the sidebar. This is a standard plugin which shows the top 10 articles measured by page views.
- “See more” at the end of each article. This is another plugin which lists 5 related posts to the post that you are reading currently.
Most recent article still takes all the attention
But that doesn’t seem to help out too much. Take for example a look at my page view stats for yesterday. My most recent article had 191 page views while the second most viewed article only had 24 page views. The most recent article had 8 times more page views than the second most viewed article!
So the question is how to keep that good post you wrote some weeks ago back in the spotlight for your visitors?
Bringing the spotlight back to your old articles
I have been thinking of some other changes I can make to improve the lifeline of older articles. Here are the changes I made today:
- I removed the featured posts I had on the front page. This means that now all articles I show on the front page are teasers only. This increases the number of articles a user sees above-the-fold when he enters my front page. The most recent article is no longer the only article visible.
- I removed the date from the articles on the front page. As my articles are not abut current events, they do not lose the value a week after or a month after. This way I hope to give the same sportlight for the article I wrote today as for the article I wrote last week.
- I put the popular articles in a more prominent position, higher up in the sidebar. Now it is visible above-the-fold without scrolling down.
Some other ways I am thinking of improving the lifetime of my older articles:
- Send tweets about an older article
- Revisit the article, update it and repost it back to the top of the front page
- Put an older article back into the RSS feed
- Making some older articles sticky to my front page
- Publish regular “status” articles with best posts of the month, most visited posts of the month, most commented, most retweeted…
What steps do you take on your blog?
What do you think? Is there anything you do to bring some of your best posts back into the face of your new readers? Do you think some of my suggestions might work?
Image by Mike Baird
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{ 25 comments… read them below or add one }
Good ideas! Have you considered putting your Search Box above the fold? It doesn’t take up much space in your sidebar and is very useful for repeat visitors! Just my thoughts…
@Matt Langford – I had the search box above the fold, but moved it back down now as I believe popular posts are more important. Search box was used on average 1 time a day.
@Myo Kyaw Htun – Yeah, that is another possibility. Creating several tabs for different sections of your site.
@Tracy – Thanks for the information! I suspected that it might work with Stumble as well. Will have to look into it.
@John – I use related posts as well and it does bring some clicks but as seen in my post above not as many as I want to.
@Rachel Levy – Thanks, glad it was useful!
@Loyan – That sounds interesting! Hand picked posts from the archive. Will look into it.
You have highlight all useful techniques here. The technique {Best Of Problogger Tab} Darren using in its problogger is also useful one.
Great ideas, Marko! I will say that occasionally tweeting older posts and sending them to new stumble buddies has worked. For example, I wrote a post about Slankets last Fall. This January, when Snuggies became super popular, I took advantage and shared that post with Twitter and friends stumbled it and the post enjoyed fresh traffic.
I also try to link older posts in my new ones whenever it makes sense.
Those are some excellent ideas. I use the popular posts plugin and I also frequently link to old articles from new ones. At the beginning of every month I also have a “best of the month” post.
The most effective technique I have found is using the related posts, this seems to do the best job of bringing traffic to older articles.
This is one of the best posts I’ve seen lately!!! I love these ideas. As a new blogger, I just started to think about … I have a couple of popular posts that are now lost! I’m excited to implement some of these ideas.
Each month I offer an “Suggested Reading” of hand picked posts from the archive. I try to choose older ones that are related to the time of year or topics I will be posting on that month.
Great blog! One of the best I’ve read today. I’ve been looking for a better blog format and you’ve shown me the way…I appreciate it! I’ve bookmarked your site. I’m a fan, now! Thanks.
I’m going to tweet some one of my older posts right now! Thanks for the great ideas.
Great post, Marko! It’s as if you were reading my mind! I noticed that many popular blogs use the short teaser preview and was wondering how I could add that to my blog and poof, your mention of Thesis Theme answered my question. Thanks for giving us all these great ideas – they are truly wonderful.
Hi Mark
This is a great post and the best looking blog I’ve seen in ages. Will certainly take on board your suggestions and if anyone needs any encouragement to use Wordpress Theme, this is it.
Thanks also to @cheth for the RT on this link, have duly RT’s to my network.
All the best and look forward to following you on Twitter
Sue
It makes me think a little – maybe I should reposition my Popular Posts section on my blog. Currently I have it in the footer, and that’s probably not getting as much exposure as it should!
Really great tips Marko. I also try to keep up with tweeting all of my new posts from my blog. Really brings in some great traffic, especially when I get some retweets.
One thing I recently did to bring older articles back into the spotlight was adapted a blog meme that I was tagged for, 7 things you may not know about me, and turned it into 7 things new readers may not know about me and this site. This way, new readers would be linked to my favorite posts in each of the subjects I post about.
~ Kristi
Hi Marko
So I bought Thesis as you said. THx for good advice.
)
However I can’t find the options to create shorter teasers of my articles. Do I need to install any (special, magic, awesome
plugin to do that.
Anyway thx for another Vgood post!
Thanks for all the nice comments!
@ziben – It is in Appearance – Design Options and then in “Home Page Layout and Content”. I will write a post soon on exactly how to do it and how I customized it. Subscribe to my RSS feed and watch out for that.
Thanks Marko. Given that I’ve only been blogging about 5 months now and I’m not a prolific poster, I’ve only just begun to worry about this. My posts aren’t really “timely” so it would be nice to keep some of my favourites in the spotlight. Excellent ideas.
I’m going to look into making the front page and category pages hold teasers as you suggest. It will give me a good excuse to get under the hood of my themes some more — I still love to tinker with the PHP.
I hadn’t thought of bringing older articles back into the spotlight on my same blog.
What I have done is take some of my older articles and post them on the group blogs I belong to.
Morgan Mandel
http://morganmandel.blogspot.com
Marko,
I regularly do the one you suggested about tweeting older articles. This seems to work really well for me.
I think that this could help me ho to the right blogger right?
Thaks for the good tip. Need to do somthing about this tomorrow.
It’s stupid to hide good articles, and it’s great if you in some cases can put older post back in the spotlight
Good post Marko. We just changed our stylesheet to display sticky excerpts of old posts on the front page. We’ve also just learned that google actually looks favorably on making revisions to older posts that have been dormant for a while so this should breathe new life into our old content.
Another method that I use on one of my websites is to group old posts of the same topic and create a new post about that topic with links to the old posts.
I've recently started to show random posts from my archive in the sidebar. My site doesn't have many visitors but I do find it makes me want to browse a lot more.
Thanks fir the ideas. I really should be tweeting older articles, and possibly updating and reposting.
Removing featured articles from the homepage and having lots of teasers is a good idea. Gives visitors lots of options. When I write some more article's I'll be converting to that.