Now Reading
How to Drive Blog Readers Towards Older Posts

How to Drive Blog Readers Towards Older Posts

Blog readers

Blog readers expect consistency, and if you’ve been blogging for any length of time, you understand the importance of keeping content fresh and interesting. However, once a new post is out in the world, most of us are already working on the next idea, topic or tips. While this is a good thing, and it can also be a bad thing. Since we are focused on moving forward with future content, we tend to neglect posts of the past.

We promote them shortly after publishing, and then they tend to lay around unless they are discovered through a variety of different means. When we truly work on improving our writing, our stories, ourselves, our best content lies ahead of us. Although that is the case, our past content likely offered up great value as well.

Failing to provide an easy way to access it is a shame after putting in so many hours to get said content out there to the world. This situation can be quickly remedied in several different ways…

Focus On Functionality

Everyone will tell you that good design is important. However, if your site is not functional, the design could really matter less. Functionality is just as, if not more important than a great design, and when you have a functional site, people will be more inclined to spend time on your site. Make it super easy for users to dive into different categories, and maybe even guide them to your more popular content.

For example, here on Blog Herald in the sidebar, we have a section dedicated to just our guides, and at the top of every page, list all the categories. Also, at the end of every blog post, we offer up links to previous content so blog readers can easily check out more great content.

Enhance Discovery

Just because you’ve written hundreds, maybe even thousands of blog posts, does not mean that people will read them. The saying “build it and they will come” is a total myth. Instead, you have to guide your blog readers, pointing them in the right direction. One of the best ways of doing this is installing a WordPress plugin called Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, or YARPP for short.

It’s by far one of my favorites, and will automatically display posts or pages that are most related. YARPP uses a completely customizable algorithm, and you can target related posts based on titles, the content itself, tags, categories and more. Related posts can appear at the end of blog posts, in your sidebar through a widget, and you can just display basic links or post thumbnails.

See Also
how to get verified

Link It Up

Using a plugin liked YARPP isn’t enough. With just about every blog post you write, you’ll talk about something that is related to past content. Don’t go crazy with links, but don’t forget to link to relevant, valuable articles where you can. It’ll help keep the cycle going, and breathe life into content that was once possibly dead. With just these few simple changes, you can dramatically increase the time blog readers spend consuming your content, and especially increase ad revenue if that’s a way you generate income.

How do you keep old content alive?

Photo credit: @Doug88888

View Comments (5)
  • Excellent post. Thanks! I need to work on my blog and your article is timely reminder to stop procrastinating and get to work.

  • Awesome. I had never heard of YARPP I will be sure to check it out! It sounds like a useful way to share related content with users. Thanks

  • Evergreen content like this post that is useful for a long period of time that gains authority and is easily found in Google, Yahoo, Bing searches is a perfect example of driving traffic back to older content like this.

  • There are widgets if you run wordpress that you can add to a site to refer to related older posts as well.

Scroll To Top