How to Revive Old Blog Posts and Increase Reader Buzz

If you have been blogging for some time you undoubtedly have posts that you felt got less than their deserved attention.   While you were busy pouring your opinions, expertise and witty repartee into each article, crickets were heard chirping in the background.  So why not revive those old blog posts and bring them back to life?!

The key to this is taking an old post and putting a new face on it.  Refresh the content with innovative ideas, your top recommendations or personal stories.  Make it engaging and fun to a whole new audience while increasing your blog loyalty and buzz!

How to Refresh Old Blog Posts

Write a Follow-Up

Go back through your past blogs and scan for anything that deserves a second look.  Did you write a blog that felt unfinished or possibly warranted a follow up due to changes or updates?  Writing a follow-up post is a great way to remind your readers about a hot topic and point them back to the original article via a link.

Link Back to an Old Post

As you write new posts, keep in mind what articles might be relevant to your topic and link back to those old blog posts.  I’ve talked about bounce rate in previous blogs.  Linking to other articles on your site is a tactic to help reduce your bounce rate and keep readers on your blog for a longer amount of time.  Plus the SEO benefits assist in page placement with search engines.

Go back and Optimize

When I first started blogging, SEO wasn’t at the top of my mind.  I didn’t know anything about keyword placement, title tags or pretty permalinks and why any of those mattered.  The good news is that you can still fix it. 

Go back through your original posts and bold or underline all of the relevant keywords.  Add links within your site to similar topics and if you have WordPress, download the important plugin All-in-one SEO Pack to do a lot of the heavy SEO lifting for you.

Also make sure you’ve optimized your images with an image title and alt text that sufficiently describes the image and content of your article.

Warning: Don’t change the permalink if you want to maintain your page rank!  i.e. the url to your post

Spotlight Your Past Blogs

Put together a post that highlights previous articles that readers might have missed. Link to a select group of your top posts and watch them take on a whole new life!

Update Social Media

Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are great tools to Tweet out or re-post old blogs.   Just because the blog is old to you doesn’t mean readers won’t find it interesting.  Social media allows a blog to go viral so why stop at the first Tweet?  Get the word out and rotate through your old blogs for increased traffic to your site.

How are you reviving old blog posts?  There are many fun ways to keep that blog in front of you readers – I’d love to hear yours!