Brands and business leaders spend a great deal of time and energy developing and promoting new blog posts. Although this is an essential activity and an important use of resources, creating new posts can also take up a substantial part of your limited time and keep you from posting anything at all.
When leveraged properly, re-promoting some of your previous blog posts can bring in new traffic, engage consumers and help your audience grow. As marketing strategies go, this rates as “easy but effective”. Here are some tips and strategies you can use to pull these posts off the shelf and put them back to work for your brand.
1. Choose your best posts.
Promoting posts that flopped the first time will get you nowhere. Although these posts may continue to draw in a small amount of traffic, focus your attention on those blogs that were most popular with readers in the past.
2. Make sure the content is still relevant.
Your post from last Valentine’s Day may have drawn in record numbers of readers at the time, but promoting it at Christmas may not be the best plan. Before you begin promoting any older post, make sure that its content is still relevant and useful for your audience.
3. Use social media.
One of the easiest ways to direct readers’ attention to your previous posts is to share these posts on various social media websites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and any other channels your brand utilizes. Each time you share a post, be sure to entice readers with a teaser or short explanation of why the post is relevant.
4. Include internal links in new posts.
Another excellent way to direct readers to your older blog posts is to link back to them from within your newer entries. When using this strategy, it’s important to link only to older entries that are relevant to your current post. Likewise, don’t include too many backlinks , as this can overwhelm your readers.
5. Don’t re-date old posts.
Linking back to previous posts is fine, but pretending they are new posts isn’t a good idea. Even if you change the date on the posts, at least some of your readers are sure to recognize that they have seen the content before. This makes your brand appear dishonest, which can drive your readers away.
6. Don’t go overboard.
Although referring readers to old posts can be a useful strategy for your brand, it can be overdone. If you share or link back to older posts too frequently, your readers may think that your brand is out of new ideas or has become lazy. Instead, spread your links to older posts throughout your newer content.
As you put these ideas into practice, pay careful attention to the results. Evaluate the number of views your older entries are receiving before and after you promote them in order to measure the success of your efforts. This will help you determine which promotion methods are most effective, as well as which old posts are most likely to draw new readers.
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