I’ve also been using Armen Thomassian’s recent trick that he covered in his 1 Stupidly Simple Tip That Will Boost PR and SEO article for a couple of weeks now and I’m already seeing some payoff from that.

I’m kinda with Sharon Sarmiento in that some of my blog entries were real labors of love that I drafted, then reworked, and refined still more before ever posting them. So, I just hate when I see those favorites not getting as much notice as I’d hoped or generating any comments. So, I try to find ways to link back to those posts so they’ll see a bit more light of day…

Now the bizarre thing that I haven’t been able to figure out is that I have a post from back in Jan. ’06 called Pretty in Pink about a group of Indo-pacific Humpback dolphins in the Pearl River Delta, between Hong Kong & Macau, that are bubble-gum pink-colored that shows up in my top 10-15 visited pages nearly every month despite having never done anything to specifically promote that page. I’ve never deep-linked back to it. And the phrase “pink dolphins” shows up as one of the top 10 search terms nearly every month too. Maybe there’s some sexual connotation to that phrase that I’m unaware of? I just wish I knew how to get some of my more favored entries to get as many hits as this little post has garnered…

Another trick I employ frequently is “deep linking” within never posts to older blog posts that are directly relevant. For example, I have an entry that’ll be going live tomorrow about the postage rate hike. In it, I’ve referenced back to an entry I did just prior to the last postage bump called "Postage Rates Just Went Up – But So What?", in the hopes that readers will click thru to that older content while reading the new post.

One odd thing I keep noticing is that one page in particular – a post titled "Pretty in Pink" – that seems to always be in my top 10-15 visited pages despite the fact that I’ve never directly backlinked, deep linked, or done anything else specfically to promote that page. And “pink dolphin” is almost always a top search phrase as well. Makes me wonder if that has some kind of sexual connotation that I’m unaware of…

I also use StumbleUpon, and have noticed there is a cycle of hits on older posts.

But there is one problem. The comments if there are any, has to be modiffied or not?

1) I find ways to link back to my favorite posts. I actually did this with my entry to the Problogger Group Writing Project. The topic of my post was “Top 5 Hottest Blogger Fantasies” and in writing the list, it just seemed natural to link back to one of my all-time favorite posts I’ve written, which was about Leonardo da Vinci. (This post tied into one of my fantasies.) So, it was really cool to get emails this week from Problogger readers who ended up reading my Leonardo post and being touched by it. :-)

2) I put links to my favorite posts in my side bar.

3) Sometimes I blog on bigger blogs than mine that get much higher traffic, and on a couple of occasions I have taken ideas from my favorite posts on my own blog, and have re-worked them to address the audience of the bigger blog. It’s really rewarding to publish on a blog with much higher readership and see the comments and trackbacks start pouring in, especially if the post that I originally wrote for my own blog fell flat. Also, there is indirect traffic that comes to my own blog from my author link on the bigger blog.

4) Re-work posts and turn them into articles for online article submissions. Not all blog posts are suitable for online article submissions (the articles need to be more formally written and kind of timeless with minimal links), but when I write a post that is “article-worthy” I’ll take some extra time and re-write it so that it’s appropriate for article submissions. The article is reaching a completely different (wider) audience than my blog post, and it has the potential to get picked up for publication in an ezine. I think I’ve had pretty good success with this, since at least one of my articles was picked up by an ezine with a big subscriber list, which resulted in a jump in RSS subscribers to my blog.

BTW–I always hear folks fretting about duplicate content with the online article submissions, but the submission service I use allows me to create unlimited variations of certain elements of my article (title, intro paragraph, resource box, and various sentences within the article) so that potentially each publisher will each receive a unique, well-written version of my article.

5) Another thing I do is re-work some of my more detailed comments that I leave on folks’ blogs to be entire posts on my blog. In fact, this comment right here is taking on “post worthy” proportions ;-), and I may just end up turning it into a post on my own blog! :-)

I did write quite a few things when I had like 5 readers, as opposed to the 250+ now, that didn’t get noticed. Hopefully as my readership increases I’ll be bringing olden goldies up and again, but not too much as you pointed out.

My point is that I can take a post and expand it if necessary on the other medium. I also do a section of the podcast where I highlight a “classic post” or two. I usually look about a year back and find an interesting post to comment on with the idea to drive traffic to the post. I also put a show notes link back to the original post.

DPeach
http://www.mythoughtspot.com