As blogs grow and new content gets created, previous blog posts can drop out of sight. What you posted last month, or even last week, can quickly get buried in the archives. And who wants to dig up old stuff?
If you’d like to bring some exposure back to those posts, here are six ways you can achieve that.
Facebook, Twitter & Social Icons
Having social icons on each blog post helps encourage readers to promote those posts for you. If someone comes to your site from Google or Bing and lands on a post from last year, and likes it, we want to encourage them to tweet it, like it, or do whatever they can to share it with others.
There are many plug-ins out there that will integrate sharing buttons. WordPress’ JetPack is a good one along with ShareThis. No plug-in is necessary though if you know how to copy and paste in code. Just head over to Facebook or Twitter and grab the official buttons.
Link Related Posts
On individual post pages add links to other related posts. This shows visitors that there is more content on your blog that might be of interest to them. I’d suggest showing five posts as it gives a little variety without giving to many options.
Try out the Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in to integrate related posts into your WordPress blog.
Showcase Popular Posts
In the sidebar, create a section for the blogs most popular posts. Pull in 5-10 posts that get the most hits, or have the most comments. Something that makes them stand out.
Check out the WordPress Popular Posts plug-in to make listing out popular posts easy.
Call Out Recent Comments
Having a list of the most recent comments, with links back to those posts, can highlight which posts are currently getting talked about. These may be newer posts, or they may be older ones, either way, you are drawing attention to them.
Use the built-in WordPress widget or get a recent comments plug-in to enable this functionality.
Serve Up A Random Post
You can add a random link to the blog navigation that when it’s clicked on, WordPress will choose a post at random to show. This works great for blogs with a lot of good information that doesn’t necessarily get outdated over time. Then again, sometimes it’s just fun to go back in time and see how things have evolved.
The Random Redirect plug-in will help in creating a random link on your blog.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is an easy way for a blog owner to control which older posts get additional exposure. When writing a post, cite what has been said in the past with links in the content. Readers may find that the supporting posts are evidence that you’re an authority figure on the topic too.
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Most blogs can benefit from using one, or more, of the items above to help showcase posts that may have fallen into the abyss of the archives. Bloggers write a lot of good content and anything that can be done to promote all content will benefit not only the blog, but the readers as well.