I have been writing blog posts for quite some time now and I have been wondering how I could make it better, personal-wise, and branding alike.
You know that scene in the movie Spinal Tap. The one where the guitarist says that he’s the person in the world that can play the loudest guitar because Spinal Tap’s amplifiers go up to 11? “One louder, you know when you need that extra push over the cliff “?
If you haven’t seen it, it is right here.
I thought, “Hey I would love to amp up to 11 for my old blog posts”. Or if you’re a mid-90s spice girl fan, giving more power to the world to makes your old stuff more accessible and searchable. There lies a huge project ahead for me, spicing up my 658 blog posts here on henrietteweber.com and using them more in the future. It’s particularly relevant now since everybody is talking about content marketing being the new big thing. I can’t figure out how content “marketing” hasn’t been the big thing since… 2003.. *cough..sarcasm..*cough.
Where am I now and where do I want to be as a brand?
How do my blog posts emphasize on this? When you’ve been writing blogs since 2005, things change. I am not the same I was ten years ago, and some of my first blog posts are absolutely cringe-worthy for me.
But, here are some parts of my plan to spice up my traffic to old blog posts.
SEO:
So far I have been using the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress in order to make the blog posts more searchable online. For me, it’s the easiest way to see if the blog posts are SEO friendly. Two other plugins that were recommended to me is the SEO smart links plugin and the insights plugin.
Links:
– Doing different content series (where you make each blog post about a subject that is also a part of an even bigger subject) is something that I have used and consulted around frequently in my work. Roundups, where you gather great inspiration from around the blogosphere (remember to share the link love though rockers!) and including old blog posts of your own, are super cool too.
– I love ps. advice that was written about over on the nectar collective, because it makes so much sense to me to go against automatization and actually remember what you have written about this yourself before.
– Another great idea is summing up your categories and tags in “best of” blog posts (or pages even?). That will also get you cleaning up some of your blogs because whoever checks out tags and categories on their site? Not. me.
– Using old blog posts for newsletters content. Maybe even have an “oldie but a goodie” column as a part of your semi-weekly newsletter?
– Submit guest blog posts on the subject to different blogs.
Visuals:
Replace old images with new ones to make them pinteresting and to make them more share-worthy. Images are huge these days and so are videos.
Social media:
You could also define what ratio you want old posts vs. new posts on your social media profiles. I try to get a new blog post up on henrietteweber.com every weekday. And my estimate is that an old blog post or two a day wouldn’t hurt on my Facebook page, Twitter, Google +, and LinkedIn.
Other places, which are hipper, more underground, and startup-like, would be Quora or Somewhere.
Pay for it:
Another option is that you can pay for it. Yes, it’s boring and mainstream but it is doable. Remember to define your call-to-action clearly though, which I always end up setting as a newsletter subscription. You can categorize your blog posts as series around given subjects and do an Adwords or Facebook campaign around those series.
