238: How to Get More Traffic by Updating Your Archives

How Updating Your Archives Can Drive More Traffic to Your Blog In today’s episode I want to talk about a trend I’ve noticed among many experienced bloggers – tending to their archives. Many experienced bloggers are slowing down on new content, while increasing traffic to to their blog by revising posts they've already written. Individual blog posts tend to get the most traffic on your site, which means there’s gold in them thar archives. But like any asset – your car, your home, even your body – your archives depreciate. Go back to the first post you wrote. You'll probably cringe at what you see – broken links, out-of-date content, and a really awful image (assuming it even has one). If you don’t maintain your archives, they become worthless. Fortunately, maintaining your archives can slow down or even reverse that depreciation. So today I want to challenge you to pay more attention to your archives. (I'm challenging myself as well.) Go to one of your previous posts and update it. (Don't worry – your internal cringe meter will tell you what needs changing.) Even small tweaks, such as fixing the obvious errors, will help. Share your updated post with my Facebook group for input and help. Finally, add a task to your editorial calendar to update at least one post a week.    Links and Resources for How to Get More Traffic by Updating Your Archives: Social Media Marketing World conference Google Analytics; Google AdSense Amazon affiliate accounts Facebook group Examples of Updating Your Archives Case Study Update – Digital Photography School Courses ProBlogger’s Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog ProBlogger Pro – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there and welcome to episode 238 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, series of ebooks, and courses, check those out especially, all designed to help you to grow your blog and to build a profitable blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. Particularly check out those two new courses, How To Start a Blog, Our Ultimate Guide to Starting a Blog which is completely free for those of you who are thinking about blogging and want to build to build a blog upon solid foundations. Check that out over on problogger.com and just look for the courses tab. And also, our brand new 31 Days to Build a Better Blog course, which we’ll be launching in the next week or two. Check that out also on the courses tab. You can pre-register to be notified when that goes live and to receive a special discount as well. In today’s episode, I want to talk about a trend that I’ve noticed amongst many experienced bloggers that may explain something you might have noticed amongst them. A lot of more experienced bloggers are slowing down how much new content they are producing. This is partly because many of them are lengthening the content, it takes a little bit longer to write. But there’s also another reason. I want to talk a little bit about one of the trends I’ve noticed amongst full time bloggers. Experienced bloggers who’ve been around for a while that might explain a little bit why they’re not publishing as much, yet they’re still building traffic to their blog. It’s got to do with looking after their archives and it’s something that I think most of us have been blogging even for six or so months should be paying attention to. This is something I talked about at Social Media Marketing World over the last week or so. I just got home from that conference. As I talked about this, I had a lot of people come out to me after my session and say this is something they’ve been doing or something they want to do more of. You can get today’s show notes over at problogger.