How to Get People to Read Your Old Posts | Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

You know how it is.

You work hard at crafting a beautiful post. You share it on link parties, people like it and it gets pinned and then after a few weeks everyone's forgotten about it.

Now and again someone will rediscover it and re-pin and then suddenly its being pinned all over again and you feel all warm and fuzzy and loved up because people like what you write.

But you want people to keep rediscovering your beloved post and lots of other fab posts as well.

Here are six great ways to help people rediscover your old posts when they come to your blog ..

Add popular posts to your side bar
Recommend posts at bottom of each post
Create a mini menu in your side bar
Put your search field near the top of your side bar
Create index pages like the Six Sisters
Empty Your Archive

1. Add popular posts to your side bar

If you are using Blogger there is a gadget you can use called Popular Posts but the pictures are a bit small. Beautiful big, clickable images like the ones at Stone Gable really attract readers and are very simple to implement.

If you're not sure how to do it check out this simple tutorial on how to add buttons to your blog.

2. Recommend posts at bottom of each post

If someone has just read and liked your post, they are in the best possible mood for more. Three or four thumbnails of related posts are a great way to direct people to more content.

There are gadgets available from nrelate and Link Within that will do it for you or you can use the add buttons to your blog tutorial again to put them in yourself.

3. Create a mini menu in your side bar

You can use a tag cloud to direct people to different categories of post but these can very soon become pretty unwieldy.

Crystal and Co has a lovely menu of small buttons that really draws people into her key categories. To create a similar menu in your side bar check out this tutorial on how to create a menu in your side bar.

4. Put search field near top of your side bar

Being the nosy type, I often want to go hunting through blogs I like to see if they've got a post on something I'm interested in. It's amazing how many people don't have a search field or have it hidden right at the bottom of their blog. If you do nothing else after reading this make sure you have a search field.

5. Create index pages like the Six Sisters

I am sure you know that Six Sisters Stuff is one of the most popular mommy blogs out there with over 100,000 hits a day.

Most of their content is recipes so they have a menu page which lists the clicklable titles of all of their posts and has an index at the top so you can easily jump to the category you're after.

This makes it really easy to see at a high level everything they've got - with a tag cloud you have to scroll through all the related posts - and easily find the posts you're most interested in.

To find out how to do this for yourself, check out this tutorial on how to create an index like the Six Sisters.

6. Empty Your Archive

Finally, you can link up at the Empty Your Archive link party which is a weekly party - every Tuesday - specifically for old posts that deserve a good dust off.

You can also link up your posts at any time in the Empty Your Archive index which organises old posts by categories.

I would love to hear your ideas on how you get people to read your old posts - do come and tell me about them.