One of the benefits on being on Active Rain for a little bit or blogging on on your own is that gives you the opportunity to go back and review your old blog posts. In my case, I can laugh at some of our older blog posts and can see our growth over time.
More importantly, it gives me the opportunity to assess and reflect what I am doing as a blogger. Do you see improvement in your blogging year over year, quarter or quarter or month over month ? There are so many things that go into one's blog such as content, design, style, photos and videos, links, keywords and the like.
This thought came about when Stephanie and I noticed that our tags for our blogs are completely out of control In the beginning and even later blog posts, I did not fully understand the tagging concept. So last night I went back to the first blog post I wrote in 2008 and one by one, am starting to update the tags. That is when I thought about the potential for this blog post as I was thinking about the multitude of benefits from reviewing your old blog posts.
They are as follows:
- Assessing your blog content: Are you writing about relevant subjects ? Engaging your readers ? Which of your older blog posts generated more comments ?
- Blog Style- How is your design now compared to then ? Are you utilizing photos and video ? Is your alignment better ? Font type and size used more effectively ? Do your blogs have a sleeker look ? Is there enough white space and not too long-winded ?
- Linking- Reviewing old blogs allows you to add relevant links that you may have forgot to do back then. It also allows you the opportunity to link to newer blogs and so forth. Interlinking strategies can provide for greater readership and stickiness to your blog.
- Keywords- Are you using keywords in your old blogs ? If not, you can take a moment or two to add some of those relevant keywords in your old blog post. Also, perhaps even the title too.
- Updating - I added a little update on some of my old blog posts. For example, if I was talking about a property, I updated that we successfully sold the property and so forth.
- Tags - Like I mentioned above, having appropriate tags are important as your blog is more structured and organized. Ours had too numerous and redundant tags (and still does) as we have many blog posts to go through.
- Planning for the future- I think by reviewing your older blog posts can give you thoughts, directions and insight in terms of where do you want to take your blog in the future ? Who is your audience ? Who do you want your audience to be ? What is your blogging strategy ?
With us, blogging is fun and we enjoy it. But we primarily do it to grow our business. We have benefited greatly in one year by receiving countless leads and clients who found us through our blog. Our goal is to continue that and even grow that part of our business through our Internet marketing strategy. Thus, it is important to us to provide fresh, quality content as well as being consistent with it, week in and week out.
We love the fact that when a consumer types in a few keywords about our local market, that chances are, our blog posts will be at the top of Google ! And when they get there, we need our content strong enough for them to contact us when they are ready !
In the future, we will be more cognizant in reviewing older blog posts more often to make sure they are updated, have keywords and appropriate links. So when you have a day of down time here and there, why not take the time to go into your archives and do this exercise. If you do, please let us know your experiences and insight. And especially so if you have already done this in the past !
What other benefits are there in reviewing your old blog posts ?
Other Related Posts:
Are you Connecting with Your Readers ?
Are You Blogging for Business ?
Have you read some of these top Bloggers ?
Promoting Your Blog - Day 3 of the Build a Better Blog Challenge
5 Ways to Recommend Price Reductions to Sellers
Day 1 of Build a Better Blog - Elevator Pitch
If you like these types of blog posts, please join the Active Rain Group "Build a Better Blog" today. And subscribe to our blog to follow along ! Is just a click away !
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Sometimes old blog posts can also give you new ideas for future posts.