In your time as a professional blogger, you’ve no doubt become much savvier when it comes to monetization. Before creating any new content, why not take a look back at what content you already have that’s still getting traffic and find ways to optimize it? Here are five tips for reevaluating, tweaking and repackaging your posts to help you maximize your content’s monetization potential.
1. Use Google Analytics
As an experienced, savvy blogger, you should absolutely have Google Analytics set up for your blog. It’s a free tool that offers very valuable information about your site and your content. It’ll help you take a look back at your existing content to find which posts you should put time into optimizing.
2. Add Affiliate Links
Imagine that Analytics turns up an old post about a popular store, like Nordstrom, that still gets traffic. You check out the post and you see the only affiliate link it contains is a coupon link that expired three years ago.
How do you take advantage of this situation? The first way is to grab an evergreen affiliate link (this is a link that doesn’t expire) to Nordstrom’s homepage, and then link your first and last mention of Nordstrom with the evergreen link. Doing so will ensure that no matter when someone clicks on that post in the future, they’ll have the opportunity to click through those links to make purchases at Nordstrom (and also to earn you some money).
Another option is to grab a Nordstrom coupon widget. Some affiliate programs, like the Savings.com Affiliate Program, offer merchant-specific, dynamic widgets that continually update with new deals and remove expired deals. For this particular type of post, with an expired coupon link in it, consider updating the copy near the original coupon link to direct your readers to the current deals in the widget (which usually works best when embedded below the post).
You may be asking, do I need to blog about coupons in order to use affiliate links? The answer is no. If you’re a food and recipe blogger, for example, who offers suggestions of cookware and tools that you recommend for creating a specific recipe, use affiliate deep links (links that go directly to the product page on a store’s website) when you mention those products, and if a novice cook or baker happens upon the post, there’s a decent chance they’ll take your expert advice. They’ll buy the products you recommend by clicking on your links, and voila. You’ve cooked up some commissions.
3. Recycle Content for Social and Email
If you know you had a lot of success with certain seasonal posts in the past, resurface that content when the season rolls around again. For example, if you wrote a highly trafficked post a couple of years back about fun activities to plan for your kids while they’re out on summer break, go through the post, update or add affiliate links so that everything is current, and share the post on your social channels and with your email audience. If you shared the post on Pinterest when it was originally published, go back and re-pin it so it appears back on the top of your board.
4. Create Landing Pages for Themed Content
Did you write a popular series of posts in the past? Or is there a topic you write about often? If so, consider creating an optimized landing page for that topic that contains some new, introductory content, as well as links to each of your existing posts. Creating a landing page for themed content could benefit you in a few different ways:
It provides you with exciting content to share with potential clients. For example, say you recently renovated your house, and you captured each stage of the project in a series of posts. If you create a landing page with an introduction to the project and a list of links to each post in your series, that would be a great asset to send along to a home improvement brand with which you’d like to work.
It makes your site more user friendly by putting related content in one place so that your readers don’t need to hunt down posts on topics they’re exploring. You can make sure that they’re exposed to everything you’ve written on the topic.
It gives less popular content an opportunity to be surfaced, and with that, it gives your readers an opportunity to click through affiliate links on the page to make sales and to earn you some money.
It can help improve your SEO ranking. If you have an evergreen landing page for a specific topic, you can promote that page over and over, which will hopefully increase the number of links back to your site.
5. Spruce Up Old Sponsored Posts and Share with Networks
Do you really like working on campaigns with Macy’s? Or would you like to get more sponsored opportunities with a particular network? Go back to sponsored posts that you’ve written for Macy’s or for the network in the past, review and update the content, refresh any affiliate links, and send an email to your contact at the company that includes a link to the updated post. This lets the network or client know that you’ll go the extra mile on campaigns, which will put you top of mind next time an opportunity rolls around.
Taking just a little time to review, revise and repackage old posts could make a big difference in your earnings, so next time you’re working on your to-do list, consider these tips!
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