Those older posts are not permanently lost either. Indexed by search engines, linked by other blogs and traditional websites, and often browsed by blog visitors, older posts continue to work long after they have scrolled off the blog home page.Older posts are like a good gift that keeps on giving.
Like a beautiful flowering apple tree, a blog continues to grow and bear fruit. It also provides sustenance from the past, like apples frozen for pies at a later date. How's that for a poetic inspiration for all of you. Okay. I'll stop now.
A tour of your visitor logs will reveal this phenomenon in action. Most longer term blogs will find visitors to older posts. Those recently rediscovered posts are often up to a year old. The reread posts are usually found via search engines or from links from other blogs. It's often said that Google keeps web pages indexed forever. Your older blog posts are web pages too, and are no exception, in the eyes of Google.
A quick perusal of your blog's visitor logs will reveal the past returning, as an endless cycle of renewal. Everything that's old is definitely new again, when it comes to blogging. After all, if one of your new visitors has never read one of your masterpiece posts, the article is all new to them. Think television shows in reruns that you missed previously. It's all new to you, right? It's the same thing with blog postings.
I've had visitors resulting from guest columns written elsewhere over a year ago. Some of the links from guest blogging on other blogs had long been almost forgotten, yet they still deliver an occasional new guest.
Links from other blogs and websites, and long since archived postings on your own blog, are another reliable source of fresh visitor traffic. Each new reader is a potential regular visitor, and perhaps someone who will link to your blog. Every day many new readers discover your blog. Many of those new visitors arrive through an older archived post.
The cycle continues. You write a brilliant new blog post. It scrolls off the home page after being read by your regular and new visitors of the week. The post arrives in your blog archives. That now almost forgotten post is stil in the search engine indexes and is still in links from other blogs and websites. New readers follow those older links to your blog. Many of them become regular readers who read your more recent posts.
Rinse and repeat.
We tend to often look at our blogs, and those of our most frequent reads, in terms of the here and now. It's a function of blog time, which turns last week's posts into ancient history, perhaps contempory with the fall of the Roman Empire.
Or even earlier.
Internet time is short and moves at the speed of electrons. We begin to think in those extremely brief time frames ourselves. Blog time is even faster than internet time. Blog time is the length of time between posts. Being scrolled off the blog home page makes a post seem like a relic from a bygone era.
We often forget that many new internet users go live every single day. Out of those novice internet travellers, some become bloggers for the very first time. They join many long time internet surfers who have also only recently discovered the power of blogs and of blogging.
Our older posts are all new to them, as our archives are fresh to those who have only recently found our blogs. There are millions of blog readers who have not discovered your blog yet. I know. That's hard to believe, but it's true. Not everyone has read your words of wisdom.
As a result, our older and often almost forgotten posts bring in some brand new blog visitor traffic. The old postings become new, and their first time readers become our new visitors. Instead of always thinking about the most recent columns and articles on your blog, take time to remember your previous writings are just as valuable. The older posts may be almost equal in value to your newer thoughts.
History works for bloggers. Your blog's archived posts are a constant source of new visitor traffic through links and search engines. Many of those brand new visitors could turn out to be new readers, new friends, and even new business associates. Since those posts are already written, you don't have to do any extra work to get those new visitors either. You can't beat that.
Your blog's past helps your blog's present and future come alive.
