Bring an Old Post Back for a New Chance

Eventually you are going to run out of ideas for what to write about in your blog. It may only be for a few days or a week, but at some point it's going to happen. Sure, eventually if you leave your blog abandoned for long enough, you'll come up some more ideas.

So maybe, in the meantime, you should consider going back and looking at a past post you've written and breathing new life into it. We are going to call this the Broker Bryant Theorem.

I was on the math team in high school and never thought I would be able to use the word 'theorem' again in my life. In fact, I'm not even sure this would be proper usage of the word. But Webster says:

theorem: an idea accepted or proposed as a demonstrable truth often as a part of a general theory

So our general theory is that blogging is a good way to educate your existing clients, reach potential clients you don't know yet and chronicle your knowledge of the industry and your market. So we are proposing the idea that bringing back your old posts to share again has value and is a demonstrable truth. Make sense? Yeah, it hardly does to me either, but let's go with it.

The reason we will be naming it after Broker Bryant is because he does this from time to time in his blog. The only person who knows if he does this because he is lazy, or because (in our dream scenario) he has too much business and is too busy to create new content for his blog is TLW, but I'm sure she is sworn to secrecy.

For today's inspiration, we challenge you to go back to your 'traffic' numbers for your ActiveRain blog posts and find a post that performed rather well. When looking at your 'traffic' numbers, you want to pay attention to the 'clicks' column. 'Clicks is the number of times the URL of your blog post has been loaded in someone's browser.

In this case, I'm really hoping that you focus on posts that were aimed at consumers and not your peers.

When you breathe new life into the post, are there things you could do better to make the post more appealing to someone reading it? Or maybe even more appealing to the search engines so more people are likely to find it?

Think in terms of formatting as you attempt to make it more appealing to the reader. Does the layout look professional? Do you use paragraphs? Do you have good white space around your images? Do things line up the way they should? Are there calls to action in the post? (links and/or buttons driving someone to an action)

From a search engine perspective, are you doing the things in your post that we speak about in our SEO training class? What? You've never taken that class or have gotten away from the using the techniques we talk about in that class? Check out the schedule to see when it's offered again.

In terms of the quality of the content........are there things that have happened since then that would require you to make some updates to the content itself? Did you find that you have posts that are getting a lot of traffic but don't seem to be helping your business? Maybe you didn't do a good enough job of proving that you are the expert on the subject. If you were the reader (possible client) would you reach out to you after reading your post? Do you make it easy for the reader to do this?

Breathe new life into that old post and see if you can raise the quality of your blog by revisiting an old blog post with a new set of blogging skills. Hopefully this will inspire you in some small way much the same as Broker Bryant has inspired us!

~Bob