It is a well established fact that continual delivery of fresh, timely and high-quality content is one of the surest guarantees of any corporate blog’s success. Yet not every business has a dedicated content team or staff blogger, while many more lack the resources to outsource content creation.
An effective strategy, then, is to balance new blog posts with clever use of previously published content. Let’s bear in mind that the ultimate objective of any business blog activity is to direct and connect your target audience to your company via valuable information. And assuming that you’ve already built a sizeable audience at your blog, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with directing them to older posts in order to find the solutions to their ongoing challenges. All that is required are a few simple steps to help you build on and optimise the content already sitting on your site…
Blogging for business – how to extract maximum value from older posts
1. Link back to published posts
Potentially the best way to direct people to your older content, and also to make it more visible within search engine results, is to make frequent use of backlinking. One approach is to link at the end of posts, but aim to also pepper links throughout the body of the post. When your readers discover that certain words and topics link back to relevant content within your site rather than adverts, they will come to trust backlinks and use them to guide their onsite journeys.
2. Promote older posts
As well as promoting your freshest blog posts via other social media channels, there is nothing to be lost by drawing your followers’ attention to older posts. Entice them with reminders of the value they’ll get by revisiting these posts, and ensure that promotional copy reveals why posts are still relevant. This tip is a reminder of the importance of regularly publishing evergreen content that will continue to offer useful advice and information over time, albeit with minor updates.
3. Offer lists of other relevant posts
Every time you publish a new blog post, make it easy for your readers to discover and consume published posts that relate to it. A variety of plug-ins make the job simple, by automatically proving readers with titles and links to similar posts at the end of each newly published blog. One such is YARPP – Yet Another Related Post Plugin – which introduces the reader to other relevant content on your site, using thumbnail images display to catch their attention.
Advanced business bloggers balance their new content efforts with old to make savvy use of resources and attract readers with a broader variety of topics. Effective blogs also harness an ongoing keyword strategy to ensure that their content is easily discovered. With all these measures in place, it’s also essential to perform regular checks on your blog’s performance stats regularly to determine the types of post that resonate best with your audience.
Over to you
What tactics does your business blog use to make older posts keep working for you?
Photo: Winston Hearn
