A short list of things you can do today to keep your blog posts relevant

As a blogger in today’s social media driven environment, I am finding that traffic is fickle at best. Our sites need to be a little more “shouty” and grab attention in a more interesting way in order to compete with the barrage of sites that are getting all the eyes.

Most blogs have a sort of “focus”. That’s not my site, however, I say with a chuckle. I try to be inventive and keep things different so readers don’t get bored. I do apologize when I have posts that don’t hit the mark.

Recently, I have posted some personal posts, trying to keep readers in on the “real” me.

But it is important to try to keep your older posts out there where your readers will see them as well. You can do a few things to get traffic going to past posts.

Here is a short list:

1. Figure out what is your popular posts. Most blogging software has a widget that will allow you to show your most popular posts on the sidebar. I have added this to mine. Check out some of the ones you like!
2. Make sure the older posts are still in vogue. If you were writing about Myspace back five years ago…well, that might not be the most relevant post you have, so UPDATE it. I still have to do this so I am not YET following my own advice, but I will.
3. Ditch the date. You do not have to date your posts anymore if you are on WordPress. There are a lot of ways of ditching the date of your post so some readers do not know when you wrote it. Apparently, some people will scroll past a post that is too old regardless of the content.

And I know there are about five other things I could say you should/could do to keep older posts interesting. I will try to post up another list soon.