Article written by Shanna Mallon.
If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ve got a hidden goldmine in your archives. All your past months or years of quality posts are just waiting for you to find a way to feature them—amplifying your influence, strengthening your relationship with readers and building your authority in the process.
Experts agree that promoting past content is a key to growing your blog:
“Having a post archive … is an excellent way to draw in more page views and improves the ability of readers to discover content on your site.” Jake Rocheleau, Six Revisions
“The archives can be helpful for a number of different purposes, including attracting new subscribers, building a newsletter list, selling products, promoting your own services, promoting affiliate products, selling advertising, and more.” Steven Snell, Vandeley Design
So instead of letting old content collect dust, use one of these WordPress plugins designed to highlight past posts!
Part 1: DRAW EYES TO PAST CONTENT
These first three plugins bring readers deeper into your blog when they aren’t already looking for it. Either through related-post links at the bottom of entries or automatic promotion on social media, they put your past posts to work for you.
Plugin #1: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
What It Is:
One of the most popular WordPress plugins for featuring past content is the Yet Another Related Posts plugin. With this feature, you can show a small list of related content at the bottom of every entry.
Why It’s Great:
“One of the more common practices of bloggers to encourage readers to read multiple pages on their blogs is to to highlight related posts at the end of your article,” says Darren Rowse of ProBlogger. The Yet Another Related Posts plugin automatically promotes a small selection of your past content, choosing posts based on a combination of tags, categories, titles and body content so they relate to the entry they’re posted under.
What’s more, the metric for picking the posts to feature is fully customizable. Through a little tweaking, you can set the plugin to only use certain parts of new posts when looking for relevance, whether just tags or titles or so on.
What People Are Saying:
- Vladlslav Davidzon at SpeckyBoy.com: This plugin “is the perfect way to show continuity of content and focus, and linkng users to related posts will help show off a site’s best work.”
- Matt Cutts, head of Webspam, Google, at MattCutts.com: “[The plugin] is very usable even without any tweaking.”
- Matt Mullenweg, WordPress creator: “[The plugin] increases the traffic on your blog because when [readers] come in just to one entry, they’ll see this other stuff going on.”
Plugin #2: LinkWithin
What It Is:
LinkWithin is a blog widget, compatible with not only WordPress, but also Blogger and Typepad, which highlights past posts at the bottom of each entry.
Why It’s Great:
This tool does more than pull up a list of links—it includes a thumbnail photo with each one. Visually oriented and appealing, it draws readers deeper into your archives through attractive graphics at the bottom of your posts.
What People Are Saying:
- Karina Allrich at Food Blog Alliance: “My favorite aspect of the widget is that LinkWithin searches your blog’s entire archive, introducing readers to the depth of your indexed [content.]”
- Frederic Lardinois at Read Write Web: “[LinkWithin is] far more attractive than most of its competitors.”
Plugin #3: Tweet Old Post
What It Is:
The Tweet Old Post plugin auto-publishes Twitter updates, on a regular basis, about your old content.
Why It’s Great:
Once installed and customized, the app is fully automatic, so you can passively promote old content without any further effort. The plugin maximizes traffic Twitter can bring to your blog and is fully tweakable—allowing you to exclude certain categories or choose to only feature some, further heightening its value.
What People Are Saying:
- Jon Loomer at JonLoomer.com: “It’s completely automated. No work for me whatsoever.”
- Liz Jostes at EliRose.com: “If you would like your old-but-still-useful posts to get more airtime, consider installing the Tweet Old Post plugin.”
- Rose Newell, The Translator’s Teacup: “It takes mere minutes to install and the settings are pretty straightforward.”
PART 2: MAXIMIZE YOUR ARCHIVES PAGE
Most blogs have automatic archives pages that link to past content by month and year. The only problem? They’re boring. Use one of these plugins to spice up your archives page and build more reader interest.
Plugin #4: Smart Archives Reloaded
What It Is:
Smart Archives Reloaded is a plugin that lists out your archived posts, displaying them in lists by year and month.
Why It’s Great:
It lists out each individual post so that readers can click titles to be taken to any post from months or years ago. Plus, you’re able to take your pick of several different attractive formats.
What People Are Saying:
- Tech Zoom In: “One great feature in this plugin is, it’s very simple in terms of size and it won’t kill your load time.”
- Jean Galea at WP Mayor: “It is probably the archive plugin which has the most configuration options, and is thus quite flexible.”
- The Spinning Donut: “[The plugin] allows your blog reader to click once on the Archive page and immediately see your archives titles only with links to each blog post. This makes it much easier to scan your archives.”
Plugin #5: Snazzy Archives
What It Is:
Snazzy Archives turns your archives page into a highly customizable space that fits your blog’s style. Past posts display as images on calendars, mapping all your content by time.
Why It’s Great:
This plugin is visually oriented, making your archives image-focused in order to draw readers’ attention. It comes with multiple customization options. You take your pick of several different layouts and effects.
What People Are Saying:
- Yan Susanto, BloggingTip.net: “For people who want fun and unique archives, you should use Snazzy Archives.”
- WP Queen: “No one has come close to creating an archive plugin, in my opinion, that is so visually appealing as this one.”
