If you’ve been in the blogging world for more than a nanosecond, you’ll no doubt have heard that content is some sort of royalty. You may even have come across Seth Godin’s message that content marketing is the only kind of marketing left. Does that mean you should be furiously tapping away at your keyboard writing new content until repetitive strain injury brings you to a complete standstill? Not necessarily. There are several things you can be doing to maximize the performance of your existing content.
1. Past Posts
A good headline/catchy title is a must when you want to get visitors clicking on your latest content, but what happens when that latest content becomes yesterday’s news - when those catchy titles aren’t visible on your home page anymore? Any blogger worth their salt will be able to tell which of their legacy posts are still driving heaps of traffic, so why not dig out that info from whatever analytical program you’re using and build on the popularity of your most visited past posts? Optimizing the titles of your past posts for SEO (as opposed to user clicks) can result in huge spikes of traffic to your site. While you’re checking your stats you might notice a few blog posts that have been particularly popular with your visitors. Could it be time for a bit of a makeover where the nuts and bolts of the text is concerned?
2. Speed it up
Taken a look at your bounce rate lately? The good old days when a site had to load within the golden two seconds are well and truly behind us. These days if your site takes more than a blink of an eye to load up and be ready to go your visitors will be someone else’s visitors fairly sharpish. It means that you should be placing great importance on getting your site to load extremely quickly. This can be as simple as optimizing images, but there are plenty of other things to consider. The best practices for web page optimization provided by the Yahoo Developer Network is a great place to start if you want to speed up the pace at which your site loads.
1. Past Posts
A good headline/catchy title is a must when you want to get visitors clicking on your latest content, but what happens when that latest content becomes yesterday’s news - when those catchy titles aren’t visible on your home page anymore? Any blogger worth their salt will be able to tell which of their legacy posts are still driving heaps of traffic, so why not dig out that info from whatever analytical program you’re using and build on the popularity of your most visited past posts? Optimizing the titles of your past posts for SEO (as opposed to user clicks) can result in huge spikes of traffic to your site. While you’re checking your stats you might notice a few blog posts that have been particularly popular with your visitors. Could it be time for a bit of a makeover where the nuts and bolts of the text is concerned?
2. Speed it up
Taken a look at your bounce rate lately? The good old days when a site had to load within the golden two seconds are well and truly behind us. These days if your site takes more than a blink of an eye to load up and be ready to go your visitors will be someone else’s visitors fairly sharpish. It means that you should be placing great importance on getting your site to load extremely quickly. This can be as simple as optimizing images, but there are plenty of other things to consider. The best practices for web page optimization provided by the Yahoo Developer Network is a great place to start if you want to speed up the pace at which your site loads.
3. Waste Not, Want Not
Think that blog post was, well um, just a blog post? Think again. There are tons of ways in which you can repurpose your existing content. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel every time you need to feed your Facebook fans or throw some juicy titbit out to your followers on Twitter. Want something quick and easy to send out to your subscriber list? How about that past post you just spent ten minutes revamping? If you’ve spent time blogging about a solution to a particular problem, make sure your sales team all know about it, so they can impart that info to their leads. It could just help them close that sale.
While there’s no getting away from the fact that adding fresh content to your blog on a regular basis is an absolute must - if writer’s block strikes, you’re in need of a quick fix, or your fingers start to bleed, take some time to look at how your existing content can work for you the second time round.
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