You blog for business. When you hit the publish button you hope that, should everything go your way, the post hammers home new links, traffic, leads, clients – the stuff your online business is made of.
Now, we all know that things don’t always go our way. While some posts may be winners in ways we didn’t expect, not every post steps up as a slugger. However, that doesn’t mean your underperforming posts have to continually weaken your blog and cost you the links, traffic, leads and clients you could be getting.
Determine goals for your posts
First things first: get yourself clear on some general goals for your posts. Here are a few goals to think of:
- The link bait. Some posts work superbly well at attracting links from others who cite it as a reference or note it as a valuable resource.
- The search engine dandy. Some posts rank well for search engine results of a particular keyword.
- The lead magnet. Some posts are highly persuasive and convert visitors into action takers of some sort.
In fact, when writing your next post ask yourself what the goal is for that post. Why are you writing it and what results are you hoping to get from it?
This is to provide you a means of measuring your posts. Power player or under-performer? Check your logs or analytics for the stats.
Performance options
The next step is to make a decision on how you wish to performance enhance your post…
Redirect. If the post content is no longer useful (info on last year’s Fourth of July event) you can redirect it to one that’s more useful (info on this year’s Fourth of July event). This is especially useful if a post has a good amount of links coming in or ranks well, just redirect all of that goodness to a post that’s more relevant.
There’s a cool WordPress plugin that will help you do this easy-peasy. By using a 301 redirect you basically pass all the juice from a post that’s no longer useful (but has links or gets traffic) to one that is more relevant and in line with your goals.
Repurpose. Actually, all your posts can be repurposed. With repurposing you take your blog post and use it elsewhere and for a different purpose. The easiest way is to syndicate your articles on a website such as Ezine Article. But, there are other ways to repurpose…
- Take a series of articles on a topic and compile them into a PDF for a giveaway or lead generator.
- Turn on your webcam and record the article as a video. Share it on sites such as YouTube or Vimeo or use the video as another blog post.
- Similar to syndicating your posts, tweak them a bit and use them as guest posts on other blogs.
Recycle. Another performance enhancing option is to get down and dirty with a post. If it’s not ranking well in the search engines, it’s time to revisit and rewrite portions for your keywords.
Other elements of your post to recycle:
- Add a new or different call-to-action.
- Swap out images for new ones. Perhaps a graph or chart is needed.
- Play with the title of the post until you find one that nails it.
- Play with post formatting. Bullet points, bolding of words or phrases, etc.
Make every post count… and then some
All in all, there’s quite a few ways you can squeeze more juice from your old and underperforming blog posts. Not only will this help boost your results but it’s also an efficient and effective use of your time… sit down once to write, get all you can from that one sitting, find new ways to leverage one sitting into multiple channels for business.
Smart and savvy. That’s the StomperAgent style.
What do you think of these ways? Any more to add?