Does your site have an incredible library of content built up?
If you have hundreds (or thousands) of blog posts and articles, it’s key to make sure that your valuable evergreen content is still getting traffic.
If you’re constantly publishing new content, however, it’s easy for the old content to get lost in the social media shuffle.
Here, we’re going to focus on five ways to make sure that content is still getting the attention it deserves.
Read on for expert tips on how to promote your blog content long after publication.
1. Keep an Inventory of Your Evergreen Content
Fact: not all content is created equally.
When we talk about promoting old content, it’s important to note that only evergreen content should be taken into consideration.
Evergreen content is the kind of content that is going to be just as relevant now as it was a year ago – or as it will be a year down the road.
Good examples of evergreen content include how-to articles, checklists, listicles, and content that answers questions – this is the kind of content you want to share on social media long after publication.
If you’re a flower company and you have a blog post on rose color meanings, for example, that blog post will not change from one year to the next – the meaning of a red rose will still be the same year after year.
On the opposite side of the spectrum is newsy content.
For example, a blog post announcing an acquisition, major sale or industry update – those are the kinds of things you can cease promoting after a brief period.
To that end, comb through your content and identify the best evergreen posts.
It’s good to keep an inventory of your evergreen content in general, not only so you can share it, but you can keep tabs on it and update it as needed.
If you had, for example, an evergreen SEO checklist, you’d need to update it periodically to reflect changes in the algorithm.
Take the recent evolution of link attributions – anyone who had an evergreen post that explained how to use rel=”nofollow” would definitely want to update it to include the new link signals rel=”sponsored” and rel=”ugc.”
2. Create a Specific Schedule for Sharing Evergreen Content on Social Media
Now that you’ve identified what content to keep sharing, you’ll want to create a social media schedule for it.
At Search Engine Journal, we’ve developed a system where the top 200 evergreen posts of the year fall into scheduled slots and are shared on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
The slots are scheduled strategically so that they don’t compete with our new articles, ebooks, webinars, and podcast promotions.
Additionally, all posts have strategic hashtags (triggered by their silos or words within the titles) and tag the author.
This was all set up through the Buffer WordPress plugin, and it’s a key for promoting old blog content consistently.
Another great option, especially if you’re just focused on Twitter, is the Tweet Old Posts plugin.
As you might have guessed, this plugin will automatically tweet posts from your blog archives and allows you to set the following:
- Tweet prefix (to introduce each tweet)
- URL shortener to use
- Hashtags to include in the tweet
- Minimum interval between tweets: this allows you to determine how often the plugin will automatically choose and tweet a blog post for you.
- Randomness interval: this is a contributing factor in minimum interval so that posts are randomly chosen and tweeted from your blog.
- Minimum age of post to be eligible for tweet: this allows you to set how old your post should be in order to be eligible for the tweet.
- Categories to omit from tweets: this will protect posts from selected categories from being tweeted.
3. Feature Other Posts on Every New Post in a ‘Most Popular’ or ‘Related Posts’ Section or Sidebar
You can get more leverage out of old content by featuring it whenever you publish new content.
One of the greatest promotion strategies is to add a sidebar or bottom section on your blog where you highlight related content and/or your most popular posts.
In addition to driving fresh traffic, this strategy will:
- Increase your click-through rate (people who are very interested in the topic are most likely to want to read more on this).
- Increase the crawl depth by introducing additional internal linking.
You can do this manually, or you can use a plugin to handle the job automatically.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, for example, has a wide variety of options and settings for choosing related content automatically.
You can set which webpage elements you want to take into account when calculating relevancy.
By default the tool analyzes:
- Titles
- Content body
- Tags
- Categories
Furthermore, you customize the look and feel of the related posts block by:
- Setting the list type
- Creating the intro
- Showing / hiding excerpts
- Setting the number of posts to display
4. Curate Multiple Old Blog Posts in Roundups
Roundups are useful for generating additional exposure to your previously published articles.
If you get a bit creative, you can make thematic roundups that highlight evergreen content.
Let’s say, for example, you have a lifestyle site or foodie blog that features a lot of recipes.
You can create an all-new blog post that curates the most popular recipes of the year, which in turn will drive new traffic to your evergreen recipe posts.
These types of roundups are useful and allow you to naturally link to a bunch of your last season articles.
5. Boost Top-Performing Evergreen Content on Social and Optimize It for Conversions
Some of your evergreen content might actually be the top traffic drivers to your site overall.
If you’ve identified top evergreen content that is ranking well and consistently driving traffic to your site, it clearly resonates with your audience.
When you’ve got unicorn content like that, I recommend doing two more things with it:
- Up the ante with social media ads.
- Optimize that content for conversions.
Try a targeted Facebook ad with a $20/day budget to drive additional social traffic to your top content.
Additionally, make sure the content is optimized for conversions since you’re investing ad spend in it – add clear CTAs in the text, sidebars, pop-up ads and/or banner ads, that will drive goal completions and conversions.
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