
How to Make Old Blog Posts Perform Again
Whether you’ve been blogging for just a year or for ages now, you have old posts that could use a little boost. This could be holiday posts that you republish every year or a story that you may want to update. Now is a great time to dust off those old posts and give them life again. Here are some great tips on how to revive old blog posts to make them perform again.
Refresh Images
I bet when you look at some of your older posts there isn’t a Pinterest-friendly image in sight. That should be your first task… to make a vertical pinnable image that is 700×1000 or 1000×1500 pixels. Images with the blog post topic or title written on them tend to perform the best. Images for Facebook need to be 800×400 and this size works best for your Featured Image as well on WordPress blogs. Make sure to hyperlink your images with relevant affiliate links as readers tend to click images more often than text. Also, images should have an SEO-friendly file name, alt attribute description, and caption – whether you write the caption underneath or use the photo’s caption area, it gets read 60% of the time!
Oh, and if your old photos are awful like some of mine are, make note, reshoot and update those when you get a chance!
Recipe Help
Take a look at the recipes you have on your site. If you are not using a plugin like Easy Recipe, you might want to think about doing so. These plugins make it easy for search engines and Pinterest to index and display your recipes. They also make it easy for readers to print your recipe and view from their mobile devices. Have every ingredient linked and sourced with where they can buy it, include coupons too if that is your thing. You can even create an Amazon widget that has all the ingredients in it to make it a one-stop-shopping experience. For quick Amazon linking and beautiful tables, I recommend using the EasyAzon plugin.
SEO, SEO, and SEO
One of my favorite SEO plugins is SEO by Yoast. Never publish a post that doesn’t have a green light. Your keywords should be in your post’s title, the first paragraph, on the image’s meta tags, and in the post’s meta descriptions. You can change the title of the post if needed, but don’t mess with the post’s permalink.
Top Performing Posts
We all have a few posts that bring in most of our blog’s traffic. If you don’t know what they are, pull a report from Google Analytics on your top posts. Make sure these posts have your highest converting affiliate links/ads in them, or at the very least, Google Adsense. Make your best posts work for you!
Going through your old posts and completing these task may seem daunting and tedious, but dedicating 30 minutes here and there can do wonders for your blog’s income. Don’t burn out trying to produce new content! Work smart, not hard!
Note: These are things that I’m trying to get better about doing. I’ve definitely seen the benefits after implementing these tips in the few posts I’ve updated. It’s going to take some time to clean up this entire blog, but I’ll eventually get it done!