Optimizing Revenue From Old Website Content
One of the things I have been taking the time to do lately is watching to see which one of my posts from the past receive traffic from highly searched terms and then optimizing the affiliate links and other info on the site to get the most out of the current traffic.
This is something I had really never done before but a few months back I remember reading (and unfortunately I cannot find it now) a post by someone about making sure you go back to old posts and update them, add a link to a new resource, add a new sponsored link, etc. This made absolute sense to me and I made a commitment to start to do that. In many cases when you build a website, or in this case a blog. You write the post and basically leave it as is for the lifetime of the site.
But doesn't it make more sense to watch watch posts are getting traffic and for what specific terms and then optimize the ads around that term, that is very targeted advertising and even though I have just started down this path it seems a pretty obvious way to generate revenue from old work.
One example is that quite sometime ago I did a real quick ebook that was really just my notes on turning up a Wordpress News Aggregator, although not my best work it does continue to get traffic. A quick optimization I did was added a Hostgator.com banner that focuses on Wordpress hosting. This is very targeted towards his post and the conversion rate will be hire than if I slapped it into a completely unrelated post.
Just wanted to give a little tip if you see you have old posts continuing to get traffic you may want to go back to them and optimize a bit. If I find the post where I found this little idea I will update this post with it.
I have started to do this on my blog and minisites, seeing which of your post get traffic can also help me decide what to write about. If I see that one post gets lots of traffic I will write a follow up or a related post.
I hope someone visiting reading this page would benefit from our mistake.
We are in China tour business and every year we’d clean out lots of out-of-date content, mainly tour itineraries and associated background info pages, instead of just leaving them alone. We noticed over the years some of the information pages such as those about Beijing hutong, the Grand Canal of China and Stilwell Museum had very high google rankings when we deleted them. In hindsight, that was a huge mistake and we’d never do that again. The popularity of those pages have a lot to do with links from quality websites such as universities and some of the customers who have been on our China tours. Since we kept deleting or moving around those web pages, those folks probably got tired and removed the links to us.
So, learn from our mistake and don’t delete your old content.
@TeenDomainer – Yep, very good point!
@Amateur Webmaster – That is something very true, I would always leave the content there, if you think it is no longer valid I would just post a message on that page highlighting what you would like them to know.