4 Ways to Encourage Visits on Older Blog Posts

Sticking with your blog through the long run can be difficult when results are coming slower than expected. The situation can be especially discouraging when you realize that the majority of your older posts aren’t getting much traffic at all. The feeling that you wrote those posts for no reason can be highly demotivating when you’re trying to gear up for the next post. Fortunately, with a few adjustments you should be able to boost your traffic stats on older blog posts in no time.

1.      Feature More Posts on the Home Page

While many blogs will only feature their most recent posts, if you want to drive visitors to older posts, you can try featuring them on your home page in their own subsection or sidebar. You may even want to set your homepage to have a never-ending scrolling feature so that more posts load up when the visitor reaches the bottom of the page – similar to how Facebook news feeds always load more content as you keep scrolling down. You can see an example of a homepage with lots of blog post links on HardwareSecrets.com.

2.      Practice Strong Interlinking

Linking to older posts within new posts is a good way to keep people on your site longer and funnel new traffic to pages that aren’t getting much attention otherwise. Plus, it’s a way make your site look more authoritative by showing readers that you’ve already covered other areas of the topic or related stories in detail. There are even WordPress plugins that can help you interlink your blog more efficiently on a nearly automated basis.

3.      Put Deep Links in Guest Posts

Guest posting – authoring blog posts for third-party sites – is a great way to promote your blog and increase search engine rankings by linking back to it, either in the content or in your author bio. However, many bloggers overlook the power of linking to older pages instead of the homepage. Look for ways to mention your old blog posts when you’re guest blogging and it will help your site gain more traffic as a whole rather than just receiving more hits on the homepage.

4.      Produce Evergreen Content

Finally, the best way to ensure that your old posts continue to get traffic even without additional promotional efforts is to write about evergreen topics. Trending content is capable of generating significant but temporary boosts in traffic, whereas evergreen content – posts that will be just as relevant next year as they are today – are more consistent in their ability to continue attracting visitors in the long-term.

5.      Good Blogging Can Self-Promote

In closing, the goal is to create blog posts that are good enough to encourage shares, links, and likes on their own. If you’re publishing posts that are engaging, entertaining, and informative, and you’re choosing topics that aren’t going to lose appeal in the near future, your blog should be able to generate a decent stream of traffic organically without needing an excessive amount of forced or paid marketing efforts.