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To republish or not to republish?
< How important is good English? | Writing great content | Would you publish a bad post? >
Sometimes you may find that a post that doesn't get the attention you think it deserves. In some cases a few of my older posts have been picked up at a later date, but most of the time, my posts don't get many comments after they disappear from the front page of my site.If someone came to me with this problem, my first suggestion would be to try linking to the old posts from new posts. I would also suggest organising posts into a logical way instead of letting the archives build up. But I've tried both methods, and I don't seem to be getting new comments on old posts.
This brings me to a question. Should an old post be republished for a new audience?
Duplication might be off-putting
You may have some very dedicated readers who are more than happy to read plenty of your posts. Constantly republishing previous posts will get old pretty fast. This is why I don't make a habit of it. However...Readers might not read every post.
Can everyone read every post on every site? Of course not. I don't know how many people read through the old posts on a site, but I usually start reading posts from the day I subscribe to a site. I would only go backwards if an interesting post was linked from a new one.Writing a follow-up post
It's not just that some people might miss your post the first time around. If you have a previous post to draw from, you can go into greater detail with a follow-up post.Perhaps some of your readers weren't at the same stage as you when you published the original post, so the post wasn't as useful as it could have been. I've often found that if I can't relate to a post immediately, I'll remember it a few weeks or months later and wish I bookmarked it.
Repetition can reinforce your key messages. Even the best writers may have readers who don't get the message on the first read. Depending on the complexity of your content, it can take a couple of tries before the message truly sinks in.
I don't think this is down to some people being poor writers - sometimes I learn things very slowly, even if they're explained clearly.
New visitors need a reason to stay.
If a new visitor finds your site but doesn't like the newest post, they might not stay at your site for very long. Republishing a great post could help with this.However, this assumes that people arrive at the site via the home page, and that's not always the case. Sometimes people will find your site via a link to a post. Either way, it helps to think about how to convert new visitors into subscribers.
I'd advise against having the same post more than once. You could send new visitors to your best posts by showing a list of the most popular posts on your site.
Controlling which post is shown first
If you write a post that's still getting comments by the time you come to write your next post, should you hold onto your new post? Even though I display three posts on my home page, most visitors seem to only look at the latest post on my site.Writing a new post will push the old posts down the page. WordPress has a "sticky" plugin so you can keep certain posts at the top, but I don't use WordPress. Besides, I think it would be misleading to always have the same post at the top - it would look like I hadn't updated for some time. And there's not much scope with only three posts on my front page.
Perhaps a better solution would be to use more of a news-style layout. The length of your home page is something else to think about.
Keeping the content current
No matter how good your last post was, things may have moved on since you wrote it. Maybe you know more now than you did then. Maybe some of it is no longer relevant. Updating the post is a good way to bring things up to date.If you update an old post, you might want to link to it in a round-up to let your readers know that it's been updated. New visitors won't know any different, and longer-term readers might read the post again.
What do you think?
Do you republish old posts?Can you think of any other pros and cons for doing this?
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Comments on To republish or not to republish?
Hi, Ben.
There is just one situation in which I republish a post. To explain it I must tell you a short story.
I started blogging on 2002 and on 2007 I changed the host from blogger.com.br to blogger.com. Sometimes I go to the old address and erase some posts, so in a few years it will be all erased.
Then, when I find an interesting post there, I republish it on the new address. Those are the few posts saved from death.
Besides that, my old posts never see the light of a home page again once they are archived.
Cheers,
I prefer linking back, preferably adding to the content. Republishing feels like cheating somehow...
I wrote this math article (about Bezier curves) ten months ago, back when my site was born. Someone found the article and said it was useful and interesting. I believe in this case, it took 10 months for my site to mature and grow before that article stood in good context for that person to find it.
Some things really need time. :)
2 ways: recommended list (based on author's opinion) and popular list (based on reader's opinion, usually by comment number).
Put some of the older articles on one of those lists, and put the list somewhere highly visible, like a sidebar. Or use both.
You can always rotate some of the articles to share some of the attention.
Lightening - highlighting your best posts is a great idea. Linking to posts is good too (I'm glad you noticed that I do that). I've found that it doesn't usually generate a lot of new comments, but it can give greater depth to the posts I write. Of course this only works once you have a good number of previous posts to link to, so I couldn't link to earlier posts when I started out.
Mario - that's a good point, though I think it's a different situation. Moving your site isn't the same thing as the old content wouldn't be at the old location (I assume).
Vincent - for me the main issue is the amount of screen real estate I have - I could add another sidebar or make the existing one wider, but my site might feel squashed. As it stands none of my home page stats appear above the fold on my screen. Hmm. I don't really want to rip out this design just yet as it's not been up for that long. One to think about.
Thanks for the comments. :)
On my personal blog, a certain amount of my content "dates" anyway. But I will highlight older posts or series of posts in my sidebar.
On my blogworld blog I'm planning to set up a page that highlights my better articles.
I'm actually REALLY bad at linking to my own posts within articles and that's something I need to work on in the future as well.
I really like how you do that Ben because I haven't been reading this blog since it began so there is stuff I've missed (that often answers questions I might have arise from the current post). Even if it's something I have read, a refresher is good.
But I would be hesitant about republishing an old article unless it had been given a serious revamp (including adding new content).