John from the Movie Blog just shot me an email with an experience he’s just had which illustrates one of the principles I tend to go on about here at ProBlogger (for example here, and):
Hey Darren,
Just a little piece of information that supports one of the things you talk about a lot here on your site… OLD POST STILL WORKING FOR YOU.
2 spikes in traffic that happend in the last week were both based on old post.
I put up a post a LONG time ago about the Colin Ferrell sex video scandle… when it came up again in the news this week, my old post brought in thousands of visitors.
Then last night… The Golden Globe awards were given out. My post for “Golden Globe Award Results”, which I put up for the 2005 awards show (a year ago) is coming up at #1 on Google and driving huge traffic today.
So there you go… just another illustration about how you’re right about the value of old posts still working for you.
John’s discovered first hand the power of Making Money with the Archives of your Blog. I’ve written numerous times on the topic – another ‘how to’ type post that might be helpful for people wanting to explore this is Increasing the Longevity of your Posts.
I’ve experienced the very same thing, an article I wrote back in May 2005 about Amazon’s price drop policy got Dugg last December, 7 months after I wrote it, and my traffic spiked.
Also, I also started using an Adsense logger plugin and saw that while my overall site’s CTR may be small, the pages that readers do click Google Ads on are few in number but their individual page CTRs are huge. Stats are amazing! :)
To really get those old posts working, they should be linked to newer posts with fresh info – for example the globes 2005 post could be linked to a globes 2006 review. It adds value and glue to your site.
Something similar happened to me, but not with such a big spike, it was actually an image i posted in one of my posts about the Tzunami…when people searched for “tzunami picture/image” in Google’s image search they were directed to my image, the spike exactly a year after the Tzunami happened.
While it wasn’t as effective as text posts, it still brought a good precent of traffic =).
A.H
[…] Something just knocked my head when i read darren’s blog . The author of movies blog had experienced huge amount of traffic coming in from his archive.The post that he made last year for 2005 award show suddenly became no 1 at google after the result of golden globe award. […]
I find old posts work best of all. I have a decent readership, but at least 80% of my visitors are fresh from Google, as I have a very high PageRank for a blog, and many of my posts get #1 for their post title. The greatest thing is that peole visiting in from Google tend to read the page then depart via AdSense :)
My regular readers tend to click on very little (other than my outgoing links), so yes, the archives are the money maker on my blog by a long shot. I don’t even run ads on my front page now because the results were so poor.
Dominating a niche is a good strategy. Another way of looking at it is like this: “If you can’t be first in a niche, find something within that niche to be first in.” For instance, GEICO couldn’t be the first in auto insurance, but the could be first in AFFORDABLE auto insurance.
22 Immutable Laws of Marketing is a good book for those kinds of principles. Actually most marketing books have a variation on it of some type, since it is such a wise strategy.
@AH:
You combined the power of archives with the power of creative spelling… ;-) Tsunami is written with a s… :)
yup, old posts always work! always! :D
It is so true that the old posts can be so lucrative-there is a residual income stream from your old content and obviously the importance as your blog grows from 10 to 100 to 100 posts.
I’ve found the CTR boost also works.
Same thing happened for me two days ago. I wrote a review of Deep Fried Snickers back in October and a BIG site posted a link about DFS (not linking to my review) and other things a few dyas ago. I posted a link to my review in their comments and it sent a flood of traffic to my site and I had my biggest AdSense day ever. All because of a post I wrote almost 3 months ago.
Brian
BTW – If anyone wants to read the DFS review, it’s here: http://candyaddict.com/blog/2005/10/26/deep-fried-snickers/
It’s so true. Over the Xmass period when I posted a grand total of 0 posts for 5 days tho I was still receiving the normal ammount of traffic I would normaly receive if I was still posting.
My stats told me that people were exploring my old posts and exploring the catagorys even tho I wasn’t posting anything new.
So good content can keep the traffic coming in during your quiet periods of bloggers block, or just plain laziness.