Blogging Basics: Make a Popular Post Using Your Old Content
So, it has been a while since I talked about anything having to do with actual blogging. So, you have spent so much time working on goals, working on stats, working on your social media accounts. Now, let’s work on a post. I want you to write a post that will be forever popular!
One of my most popular posts on this site is my top 12 household notebook sites post. I wrote it back in January 2010 and to this day (over 2 years later) it is still getting linked to and still getting traffic! It isn’t some phenomenal post… there really is no reason it is so popular. However, I know how to do it again and do it even better!
Go to your Google Analytics account and set your timeline from the very first day of your blog all the way to today! My screen shots are of my Southern Mom Cooks site since that one is newer and easier to take pictures of. Besides, it has way less traffic and way less content making my tutorial that much easier. LOL!
Then, you want to go take a gander at your content to see what is most popular. This will help you decide what type of post to create. I created a Ten Most Popular Recipes post for Southern Mom Cooks that will be going live over there on Friday.
Here’s my screen shot
As you may be able to tell (or may not), the top 10 posts are NOT all recipes. So, I just continued scrolling until I had 10 of them.
Choose your top ten whatevers and write a post. Don’t forget to include your keyword basically 1 time per 100 words within your post. Also, name your picture using your keyword and put your keyword near the beginning of your title. Then go to Flicker or similar (or take your own) and come up with a great picture for that post. I simply made a collage of a few of the foods from my recipes – you might be able to do something similar. Be sure you watermark your picture in some way.
Once you have a FABULOUS post, share it with me via email, and then check back over the next few weeks as we learn to market this popular post. What is your goal? My goal is to get 2,000 views on that post! Can I do it?
Remember, keep doing everything you are doing with your normal blogging… this is an extra few minutes per week to increase the popularity of one post!
You always have such great ideas! I definitely want to do this! Now… I could use a little advice… unfortunately for me, when I look at my analytics to see what posts have been most popular I have two things:
1. The MOST popular posts are already “list” posts – like “water play activities for toddlers” etc. and they are already all linked to each other in each post b/c those were a huge series I did last summer. So to do post relisting those is just redundant I think.
2. The NEXT type of most popular posts are my giveaways. I guess this tells me what people are coming to my site for and that I need to have more posts with other kinds of content…
but what to do in the meantime? Do you think it would work to take the giveaway posts and do something like “Top 10 natural baby items” from things I’ve reviewed? I’m curious what you have to say on that idea and would love your feedback! Thanks!
I haven’t done this site yet, but when I do I am sure I am going to run into the same issue you have. What I would do is try to get those not as popular posts to be more popular. 🙂 So, I would keep going until I found my next set of popular posts and create a post around them.
I also REALLY like the top products idea and if you contacted the companies when you wrote the post, they would probably be thrilled to be mentioned again and it could bring you back into their focus.
Oh good point about mentioning it to the brands… but yeah I probably need to focus in more on other topics – maybe breastfeeding or cloth diapering or something – even though those are WAY down the list after giveaways. I can’t wait to read about how to market such a post! I’m going to work on creating mine so I’ll be ready!! 🙂 (By the way, SO awesome that your cooking site took off the way it did! I wish I had time to do another type of blog!!!)