How to revamp an old post

The more we blog the more we refine our approach, developing our own style as well as learning what works for our audience. Most bloggers will admit they look back on their early posts with a bit of a cringe and some even consider deleting them completely but what a waste of your hard work that would be when with a bit of polishing these posts can keep bringing you traffic for years to come.

Try and make time in your schedule to look at one old post a week. What little tweaks can you make to get it up to scratch? The key areas to consider are:

Content

Could your post be updated or extended? Maybe it could be expanded into more than one post. Would it benefit from adding a downloadable resource like a checklist or worksheet. Might an infographic better illustrate the information?

Images

A fresh header image can give a post a new lease of life not to mention improve your chances of getting traffic from social media. Don’t be afraid to look at stock photo sites if photography isn’t your strength and aim for a consistent style across your posts.

SEO

Getting to grips with keywords takes a while so early posts can often use some improvement in their SEO. There’s no shortage of tutorials online if you need advice but the most important thing is to keep in mind not how you would describe your post but how are people likely to be searching for content like this.

Pinterest

Ensure your images are pinterest ready to make it as easy as possible for people to share them and send you traffic. Have at least one vertical (tall and narrow) image, complete the alt tag with a caption including keywords and consider adding a ‘pin it’ button.

Internal Links

Adding links to other relevant posts you have written is both good for SEO and helps to keep people on your site, reducing your ‘bounce rate’. Linking to one or two other posts within the text is normally easy enough and you could also consider a plugin like ‘Related Posts Thumbnails’ that will automatically add a range of posts from the same category at the end of each post.

Call to Action

It can feel a bit odd at first to ask your readers to do something for you, be it share your post or visit your facebook page, but often your readers are more than happy to help you out (they like your blog after all or they would be there in the first place) and just need a little prompt. Get in the habit of adding a friendly ‘call to action’ at the end of your posts and you’ll be surprised how many people will respond. Don’t forget to make it easy for them by providing social sharing buttons, ‘tweet this’ links etc.

Affiliate links

If you’re a member of an affiliate programme you may be able to add a relevant link into the post. Even if the post doesn’t include a specific product, is there a book you could recommend for further reading? Something you were using that inspired the post? Something that could be used with your craft? A storage solution for the ingredients of your recipe? Think outside the box a bit!

Finally, once your post is looking all shiny new share, share, share! Schedule it to go out to you social networks over the coming weeks. Buffer is great for this and a plugin like ‘Revive Old Post’ will keep your back catalogue going out over time. Pin your new images with detailed, keyword rich captions and add it to any suitable linkies, share days and round ups.

If you have any other approaches you use for revamping an old post do let us know in the comments and if you found this post useful it would be great if you shared one of our pins below. Now off you go, these posts aren’t going to polish themselves!