Do you ever wonder about the worth of having a blog? I often have to show new clients the potential for what they can achieve with a blog while at the same time, I need to be realistic and point out that blogging isn’t a magic silver bullet. Generating traffic and sales via your blog takes time and continuous effort. However, once you have the blog in place and are posting consistently with focused keywords, your blog posts will continue to deliver traffic for months and years.
Just to ‘prove’ that old posts continue to deliver traffic, I’m going to show you some figures from a blog that I set up a couple of years ago as an experiment. I set it up on the free wordpress.com service partly because I wanted to show clients how their new blogs might perform and partly because I wanted to see if it would deliver traffic and sales to my ecommerce business at the time. The blog focused on wallpaper, I started it in December 2011 and blogged a couple of times a week for about a year. Apart from sending out each post in a tweet, I didn’t do any other social sharing at the time so all traffic was really coming from organic searches.
What surprised me somewhat was that the blog is continuing to attract traffic and mostly organic traffic too.
As you can see in the screenshotabove, traffic has reduced. Bear in mind too that these are wordpress stats, not google analytics as it was a free wordpress blog. But you can see that even 18 months after the last blog post, it is still getting 300-400 visitors per month with about 600-750 views. It even got a surge of 88 views in one day yesterday. It’s not amazing but not bad for a dormant blog – it just shows that for some people, these posts must still be showing up on the first page of their search engine.
Looking at the statistics for the most popular posts, I can see that two of the ‘how to’ posts are most popular with the specific detail of focusing on a girl’s bedroom coming out top. By looking at your most popular post titles you can assess which titles are working best for your blog in terms of attracting traffic – as long as they are resulting in sales of course.
What can you do with an old but popular blog post? It would be a good idea to edit it to some extent, for example, you could alter the call to action. If the blog post features some products that used to be in your ecommerce shop but have now sold out or been discontinued – change the product image and link. The post should continue to attract traffic and it can still lead to sales as long as the products are in stock and the call to action is current.
If you are passionate about your business, you should be blogging about it – not just to tell others how wonderful your products are and how their features can solve problems and meet the needs of your target audience but because Your Business Is Worth It. Your business deserves shouting about and having a blog will ensure people know about it.
Which is your most popular post? Do you know why it is the most popular? How long ago did you write it and have you updated it at all? Do let me know in the comments below.
If you would like to learn more about improving or starting a blog, do get in contact or book into one of our summer term online blogging courses.
