This is the kick off to our annual January Blog Challenge: 31 Days To Clean Up Your Blog. What better time than January to sit down and review your blog? Over the 31 days we'll be sharing 31 tips, ideas, and strategies for you to deal with all those pesky maintenance tasks, take steps to grow in the new year and make blogging easier. This is Day 20.
Now that we've got you using Google Analytics to analyze what's happening on your site, it's time to start putting that info to use in a practical way! Today, we're asking you to use your analytics to determine your 10 most popular posts of all time. If you've been blogging for a while, some of these posts might be quite old (they've likely built up a lot of search engine juice).
Once you've pulled together a list of your top ten, it's time to go visit them all and make sure they're highly shareable:
- If it's an older post and your photography has improved, you may want to think about re-shooting the dish
- Do the posts have Pinterest friendly images? Here's some help on how to make great, highly shareable pins.
- If they're posts that already get great traffic from Pinterest, make some new pins and start scheduling them - Pinterest loves new pins!
- Make sure you have images that are Facebook and Twitter friendly (horizontal images)
- Make sure you've filled in title and alt tags for the images.
- Use a social sharing plug-in like Social Pug that lets you assign Pinterest images and Facebook and Twitter images, as well as social media descriptions for each. This allows people to share your content with the click of a button. You can also insert tweetable quotes into the body of your post.
- Prompt people to share by adding a heading and image to the bottom of each post reminding them to save for later or to share with friends
- If you work ahead and schedule evergreen content on social media, make sure these posts are in the rotation
Once you've got your top ten posts in tip top, shareable shape, move on to your next 10!
Take it Further: Want to capitalize on the popularity of those posts further? Consider adding them to your blog's sidebar and letting your readers know, these are the cream of the crop posts they don't want to miss!
And, as we mentioned in on Day 3 of our Blog Cleanup, you can also add links to these posts in your About/Bio page to point your new readers to your best content!
More Reading
- How To Make Pinterest Images For Your Food Blog (with Case Studies)
- How To Make a Great About Page (with Case Studies)
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I am sooo glad you brought this up, and specifically point #2: If it’s an older post and your photography has improved greatly, you may even want to think about re-shooting the dish.
OK, so definitely my photography has improved over the years. In the beginning, my shots were TERRIBLE. Seriously. So, suppose I remake the recipe and I reshoot it. Can I swap in the new photos into the old posts? Is that okay? Will Google get mad at me and penalize my blog for this? I was wondering if it was better to revisit the recipe in a new post and feature new photos at the same time.
it shouldn’t matter too much – you’re not changing the content of the post. I know there are a few bigger bloggers who have done this.
G’day and continued great tips and would not have thought re #2 to do…will be taking that under advisement now and placing it on my list to do! Thank you!
Cheers! Joanne
awesome Joanne!
Oh My! I found this site looking for photography tutorials and came across this 31 day challenge.
The good news is now I know what to do. I had no idea that Pintrest changed the rules on photo aspect ratios.
The bad news is now I need a year to work this 31 day project
Ƭhis is a great tip particularly to those new to the bloɡosphere.
Brief but very accurate infо… Thanks for sharing this one.
A mᥙst read post!