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I usually don’t give advice about blogging because there are many professionals who are very good and expert and can do much better than me. However, I started experimenting with this activity about four years ago and after a few months I opened this blog so I learned a few tricks too. 😉
After some time, on a blog there are more and more articles and the older ones are at risk of being forgotten. Continuous news are essential because it’s true that success is determined by quality but quantity is also necessary because a rarely updated blog gives the impression of being abandoned. At the same time, the old articles are to be considered an asset to be exploited to the fullest.
When I started my blog, the situation in social media was different and in particular Google+ had not yet been opened. Now that Google’s social network has grown, also with its Communities, there’s a whole ecosystem for posting old articles. Mind you, post in Communities should be made in the right way, meaning after checking where they are allowed to avoid spamming them and with the right cadence, such as one every week.
Leveraging new or expanding social networks is a great way to exploit your own blog but you can also do this by exploiting existing resources in a new way. For example, occasionally I find new interesting groups on Facebook where I can post articles of my blog. Again, I check if I can do it and usually I post one every now and then.
Regardless of the social network, there are occasions where it makes sense to repost old articles. For example, I write reviews of science fiction novels and sometimes I also write articles about writers so a new edition of a novel or subsequent authors’ birthdays can be a chance to post old articles again.
Another way to exploit old blog articles is to link them into new articles someway connected. For example, science fiction reviews and articles about writers give me a way to insert several internal links to my blog.
When I publish the review of a novel by an author I wrote about on my blog I put the link to that article. When I publish novels that belong to a series, I’ll put the link to the review of the previous one. Sometimes, I happen to put links to reviews of works with similar content.
I’m doing a more sophisticated work on items connected to the TV show “Doctor Who”. Over the years, I have published reviews of episodes, articles about various actors / actresses connected the show and a number of articles on the occasion of the 50th anniversary. All this has allowed me to slowly build a complex network of internal links among various articles I’m still developing.
Each blog has its own personality so every blogger needs to find the most suitable ways to exploit old articles. You need to experiment a bit to figure out the best way to use the your blog’s old articles but with some imagination you can get excellent results.
