As a blogger we often forget what just may be the most valuable asset for our blog. Our content! Content is often written, forgotten, and then collecting dust within a matter of just a few weeks. It’s time to dust off those old posts, and bring new life into them. Here are four ways that you can make sure that your archives don’t start collecting spider webs.

1. Link to them. OFTEN! Once you reach the 50 post mark, you should almost always be able to find an old post to link to. Internal linking is one of the keys to search engine optimization, and it should be used as such. There is no such thing as a dead post. With a good linking strategy, you should be able to rotate and revolve your posts. Keep up the linking, it really does work. Don’t forget that every link you place on your blog is looked at as an incoming link from the search engines. Even though it’s an incoming link from your own blog, it still holds weight. To optimize internal linking, you should try to keep your internal & external linking rate at about 50/50. Simply put, you want to link to your own posts as much as you link to others.
2. Use them for Blog Carnivals. Blog Carnivals are a great way to reuse old posts. This method should be used for ALL posts that you can find relevant Blog Carnivals for, but especially old posts. Old posts are just sitting around… why not get some value out of them?
3. Submit them. Do yourself a favor and submit your articles to any source you can find. There are article submission directories - like this one - all over the web. Take advantage of them. It’s a great way to build a HUGE amount of incoming links, and to this day, I’m still getting links from articles I’ve submitted MONTHS ago. And if you are all about saving time, do yourself a favor and use this tool to automate your work. It submits to 668 directories in the same time that it takes you to submit to one! I owe at least 30% of my links to this tool. The best part about these old articles is that they should already be indexed in the search engines. This means that unlike newer articles that you should re-write before submitting to avoid the duplicate content penalty, these should be free and clear since they were indexed on your site first.
4. Re-write them. After writing daily for months and months, there are some posts that you will find to be timeless. These posts can be re-written and revamped so that you can post them again, on other peoples blogs. That’s right, re-write articles and use them as guest posts. It’s a great way to breathe new life into old posts, and it gets you some much-needed exposure. There aren’t a lot of things you can do as a blogger that are more beneficial than guest blogging somewhere. Go for it!

Anything you’d like to add to this list? What have you done with your old articles?

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