8 Ways To Get Traffic To Old Blog Posts

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This is part of my 30 Days To More Traffic Series

I’ve recently been thinking about how to get traffic to my older blog posts that are high quality.

I did a little research and came up with 8 ways to get traffic to these “oldies but goodies.”

1.  Tweet links

One of the easiest ways to get traffic over blog posts is to tweet the title and a link to the blog post.

Example:
Video: How I Got My Biggest Traffic Spike http://su.pr/2idvFO

If you have a decent following on twitter this can get you traffic pretty quick.

Automate your tweets

You can easily automate this using the free service at http://su.pr. It allows you to schedule tweets in advance. It will also automatically shorten your URLs for you.

Example:  I scheduled the following for 3 days in the future:
Video: How I Got My Biggest Traffic Spike http://nickstraffictricks.com/2950_how-i-got-biggest-traffic-spike/

And this was posted to twitter 3 days later:

Video: How I Got My Biggest Traffic Spike http://su.pr/2idvFO

2. Re-Publish

This might be surprising to some people but you can republish quality blog posts. I recommend making sure that the blog posts are at least a year-old before you consider republishing them.

If you’re like me and your traffic & readership has increased dramatically over the last year then chances are that very few of your current readers have ever seen these blog posts.

Beware of date inconsistency

If you republish a blog post then the date associated with it will be updated but the dates for any of its comments will remain the same. In this case it’s possible end up with comments with a date that is older than the blog post’s date.

This can cause confusion for readers (it happened to me once or twice). To avoid this from happening you can put a line at the top of the blog post that says:
This was originally published on {date}.

3. Create a Directory of Your Posts

You can make a list or directory of all of your quality blog posts and sort them by category. I did this recently for my 300+ traffic posts and I called it Traffic 101. Doing this has helped me get traffic to a wider variety of blog posts.

Once you have the directory created you need to link to it from a prominent location on your website. The directory won’t do you any good if no one can find it.

Keep it up-to-date

As you publish new one posts you’re going to want to make sure that you add them to your directory.

For me it’s a little tedious to update this directory every time I publish a new blog post. So instead I wait till Saturday and update the directory with all of the posts for that week.

4. Create a follow-up sequence for your email list

If you have an e-mail list then you really need to consider setting up a follow-up sequence. A follow-up sequence involves sending periodic e-mails to a person after they sign up for your list.

For example when people sign up for my Nicks Traffic Tricks e-mail newsletter I automatically send them a welcome message and then 4 days later I sent a short e-mail with a link to one of my most popular blog posts. 4 days after that I send another e-mail with a link to another popular blog post. I continue doing this every 4 days.  For you, 4 days may not be the right number but you get the idea.

It’s important to keep these e-mails short and to the point. Here’s an example e-mail:

Subject: Free back link to your website from me

Hi {name},

I want to give you a free back link from a popular website:
http://nickstraffictricks.com/1537_free-back-links-to-your-site/

Thanks,
Nick

5. Show Related Posts

In the past I talked about the importance of showing related blog posts.

In fact I devoted a post to the topic which you can read here:
http://nickstraffictricks.com/2870_video-how-to-get-more-traffic-with-the-related-posts-plugin/

6. Guest Blogging

Guest blogging has become a popular way to jump-start your traffic when your site is new. When you guest post on someone’s blog they pay you back with a link to your website. People usually ask to have the link point to their homepage.

But instead of linking to your blog’s homepage ask yourself, “Is there a high-quality blog post that is very relevant to my guest blog post?”

For example if you have a blog about dogs and your guest post is about dog grooming then you might consider having your guest blog post link to a dog grooming post on your website.

7. StumbleUpon & Onlywire

Another way to get traffic is to make sure that all of your blog posts have been submitted to stumble upon and onlywire.

Learn more about onlywire here.

Whenever you post something new to your blog you should submit them to stumble upon and onlywire.

If you’re like me, you will occasionally forget to do this and end up with a large number of blog posts that were never submitted.

In section number 3 I talked about building a directory of your best blog posts. You can go through this directory and determine which ones haven’t been submitted.

If you have a large number that have not been submitted, say 100, you don’t want to go and submit them all in one day. Instead submit one or two each day.

8. Link to relevant posts

Whenever you’re writing a blog post there will often be related blog posts that you can link to throughout your post.

Do you notice how many other blog posts I linked to in this post?

Did I miss any?

Did I miss any ways to get traffic to “oldies but goodies”?

Tagged as: traffic