Once you have been blogging for a few years or have broken the 1,000 RSS feed subscribers mark, you will find that older posts receive less and less traffic and eventually sink into oblivion. Your audience only reads the fresh content and no one will bother to click all the way through the hundreds of pages to find what you wrote several years ago.

This impacts your blog in two aspects:

1. You lose in terms of average visit times. More page views boils down to more exposure to ads or your brand and, therefore, more money in your bank account or more customers if you run a business blog. Maximizing the time your readers spend on site should be one of your top goals.
2. Less article views leads to fewer natural links. How can people link, tweet or share your content on social networks if they don’t read it first?

Here are a few short and sweet tips to bring old content back in the spotlight without sounding too desperate for traffic.

• Refer to old posts in new articles. For example, you could use something along the lines of Like I said last year (and link to the post), product X will help you do this and that. Don’t re-iterate ideas from the old article, let your readers click through and read it again.
• Build a round-up of old post matching a certain criteria. There are numerous Wordpress plugins and other blogging platform plugins that will display most popular topics in the sidebar, based on a set of tags or categories you choose. It’s alright to even have an occasional article with hand picked links, something like Best products we reviewed in 2009 or Best picks from last Halloween.
• Tweet old posts. As your Twitter follower base grows, it’s highly likely that a lot of people have missed the old posts. Doing it manually can be tiresome and time consuming, not to mention hard to schedule. There are Wordpress plugins that seamlessly do it for you—check out this plugin: Tweet Old Post.
• Configure your Related posts plugin to pick one or two old articles even if it can find more relevant and newer ones.
• Write follow-ups on older posts. For example, if you have tested a product a while back, you could announce how it did or did not meet your expectations in the several months you have been using it. As long as you don’t mention the core features and link back to the original article, you will have your readers go through the whole review again.

Keep in mind that these tricks should only be used to revive a small set of articles. Use them to promote your best content and don’t bring back everything you wrote in years past. Keep focused on providing quality fresh posts and only link back to old content every once in a while.