You can get more traffic to older blog posts, by repurposing old blog content and adding tips on social media to improve traffic and shares.
I’ve been blogging monthly for over 6 years, and over this time I’ve built up over 120 articles with tips and strategies for SEO and small business websites. However not many people see my older blog posts. So, this summer I decided to try to get some mileage out of the older, still relevant articles by doing some content link building.
Generally, I don’t do a lot of link building as content creation is now the preferred way to improve website visibility. However because I write many articles full of useful tips, I decided to share these tips with my social media connections on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
This approach accomplishes several goals:
- Improve social signals to blog content for Google search algorithms
- Improve visibility of old blog content that is still relevant
- Increases traffic and shares to my blog
How social traffic and shares to my old blog posts increased
I want to share some data with you for the first 2 months of my experiment in getting traffic to older blog posts. For this purpose, I just wanted to look at two things:
# of visits to my blog via social media links from Buffer
# of shares through AddThis
This is what I discovered:
The number of visits from owl.ly Buffer links quadrupled
The # of shares through AddThis went up about five times
I was surprised at these numbers as the owl.ly visits and the AddThis social sharing had been flat for months.
Not everyone will achieve these same results as it is a pretty limited time frame and not a controlled experiment, however it is food for thought when considering content link building ideas.
How to repurpose old blog content on social media
What did I do to get a bunch of traffic to older blog posts on social media? Here’s my 3 step approach to re-promote blog posts on social media:
Create a spreadsheet with two columns: Tip and URL
Have someone manually read through your blog and fill in the spreadsheet with tips
Post tips to social media twice a day
1. Create a tips spreadsheet for social media
In the first column, you will put a Tip that can serve as a tweet. So, it must be less than about 120 characters to allow for a possible URL.
In the second column, you will put the full blog post URL which links to the post where the tip came from.
You can add an optional third column for shortened URLs, which I recommend if you are going to use Twitter as one of your social media websites. If you use a tool like Buffer for posting to social media, they will automatically shorten the URLs for you which means you don’t need this column.
2. Have someone read your blog and fill in the spreadsheet with tips
This process is labour intensive as you do need to come up with Tips that are self-contained. That is, the Tip itself makes sense on social media if people read it out of context. People can always get more details on the Tip by clicking the link in the social media update.
What I did to get the tips for 60 articles, was to hire a virtual assistant to read through the blog and create the tips spreadsheet. If you have a college student handy or a receptionist with time on their hands, then this might be a great task for them to tackle.
Another idea is to brand your Tips. I decided to add a prefix to each tip to identify it further: “Your SEO Tip:” Keep in mind that the prefix does use up some of the characters for Twitter.
After the Tips spreadsheet is put together, review it for accuracy. As you write new blog posts, periodically create a new tips spreadsheet.
3. Post tips to social media twice a day
The next step is to get your tweets and Facebook status updates out there. You can manually do this every day or use an automated service like Buffer.
Since I’m a solopreneur, I decided to go the automated route. However if you have a receptionist, virtual assistant, or social media guru, they may handle the manual posting duties.
Remember to include the direct link back to your blog post in each social status update.
I upload posts to Buffer so they appear on social media twice a day on weekdays only. I use Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
You can choose whatever days of week, times, and social media sites that make sense for your business.
The above is how I get traffic to older blog posts in less than an hour a month of work. Best of luck!
