5 Tips To Get People to Visit Your Old Posts

One of the questions people repeatedly ask me is how to get people’s attention back to old content. Truly, this is one of the most infuriating problems faced by bloggers these days. They work hard to develop their blog and write useful content, and end up having heaps of archives, which no one really reads. People don’t really bother exploring archives of a blog, new entry is all they read.

There are, however, variety of ways to get people read your old posts. One of the best ways to do this is having sections like “popular posts”, “random posts”, etc. These sections can be placed on front page, side bar, or navigation area, or whatever location you feel would attract people to read the posts. You couldn’t, however, paste links of all your previous articles due to limitation of space. Hence, make sure you have links to some of the best posts of your blog.

Now these tags are, however, pretty common. So, you can use new title for such columns like “best of …”, “David recommends”, or “popular posts in January”, something like that. If you have lots of traffic on your front page, chances are majority of these people would be directed to your old posts.

Another idea to make people read your old posts is by having an auto responder. If you blog has good readership, you will receive numerous emails everyday. You can have an auto responder set in that send links of some of the very useful content to the people, which they might have probably missed earlier. Or whenever they sign up for a newsletter, this auto responder will send them the outline of your blog covering key content.

You can also have a section known as ‘related posts’ at the bottom of every article on your blog. This section should provide links to articles that are quite similar to the existing post. So, if a person is seeking for information on a particular topic, he would love to find similar content on your blog. Many wordpress plug-ins can do this for you. However, doing this manually would generate better results.

If the year is about to end, you can use something known as “best of 2009 or 2010” or whatever the year is. This bunch of links itself would be a post. It is, however, not necessary to wait till the end of the year to post such links. You can do it every month. If you really want people to read the content of your old posts, you can alter it a bit, may be by adding few pictures or updated information, and re-post it.

I guess every blogger must do these things to make people read your old posts. You have spent hundreds of hours to create these heaps of articles. Don’t you want people to read it?