Blogging’s Biggest Problem and How to Alleviate It

As I dive deeper and deeper into this blog and as posts continue to pile up one problem keeps coming back to haunt me. It is a problem that exists for almost every webmaster, but I think it hurts bloggers the most.

Blogging’s biggest problem is that most of the best content gets lost on almost every blog out there.

Whether you are a small time blogger struggling to maintain your 50 feed subscribers or a big cat with 20,000 or so daily readers, you will almost certainly have to watch some of your best content fade off into the abiss only to be read by a handful of people. That is the nature of a blog. Blogs are in the moment, that is how they are designed. Sure there is an archive and just about every blog nowadays is sorted into categories. How often are those used though?

Do you check which pages are most visited on your blog? If you don’t you really should. And if you do I’m sure you’ve noticed that the vast majority of your archived stories go unread. As for NBB, the bulk of the stories I see people reading are frontpage stories and past stories that received major Diggs (thus resulting in repeat traffic from old del.icio.us accounts and other linkbacks that are a little slow).

There are a couple methods that I use to try to encourage my readers to visit older articles.

Post Roundups

If you’re a regular here then you have probably seen a couple of my monthly roundups. I have found that not only is this a great way to get your current readerbase interested in your past articles, but it also generates some decent backlinks from other bloggers who may not have been familiar with your blog back when the article was written.

Post roundups don’t have to be monthly, they can be however frequent you want.

Interlinking

As I mentionied in 5 Blogging Methods that Work, one of the easiest and most effective ways to get your readers exploring your blog (including past articles) is to simply link to them whenever there is a context for it. You don’t have to go crazy and link to your “domaining” category everytime you use the word “domain” but whenever you see a chance to link to a past article go for it.

Another great thing about constantly interlinking is that you may even discover an old post that you wrote yourself that even you have forgotten about. Sometimes it’s just nice to re-read your own content.

Revisiting Old Topics with New Information

A lot of bloggers suggest reposting old articles under new headlines with slightly different context. I know John Chow has done this on a couple of occassions especially with his AGLOCO articles. I tend to steer away from this due to the fact that I just like fresh content. What you can do, however, is to take a new topic and relate to an old one.

For example when I wrote about PPP Direct recently I also reminded users about my post on the new ReviewMe marketplace.

So how do you get your visitors to read your old posts? I have a couple methods (all of which are pretty simple) and I’m sure there are a ton of others out there. If anybody has any suggestions on how to get their readers into old content please drop me a line in the comments as I’d love to hear them!