How To Make Money With Old Blog Posts
Well, here is yet another secret that I am about to unveil. Making money with social blogs can be kind of tricky. A blog format really in many ways isn’t a very economical environment for making money if your blog remains a social blog.
The problem with social blogs is that once your content is bumped off the home page and all your regular readers are done reading it, it gets put into a grave yard. In other words, you can write the most entertaining, informative or useful post in the world, but it really doesn’t matter after it leaves your home page. (to an extent)
Once you post leaves your home page, it will then slowly start to transition from getting regular reader traffic into getting search engine traffic. At that point in time, you have a choice:
Option One: You can just leave your post alone and do nothing with it, maybe you’ll pick up more regular readers. I haven’t found that to be very true. SERP traffic are looking for destination points and then they want to go about their lives.
Option Two: You can do what I have started to do. And that is overwrite my dynamic posts with a static HTML page that is totally “In Your Face” monetized.
Here is an example…
A few months ago, I came up with YouTube Layouts. It was fun, exciting, etc… I don’t have time for this, I really don’t. However, my Free YouTube Layouts page happens to be one of the most popular in the search engines. We’re talking TONS of traffic… The page itself is a PR3.
So, why not? What do I care… to me, that is MONEY wasted. So, I slapped up a static HTML page and over wrote the existing dynamic post page. You can see the result here.
Within just a few hours, I have already made $10 dollars.
Ok.. So What’s The Point?
The point is, you work your butt off on your social blog and don’t receive much money for your efforts. So, when you content is DEAD to your readers, then bring it back to life and make some money off it. You wrote it, do what you want with it… and by all means, once these pages pass off your regular reader’s radar, change them and make some money!
Popularity: unranked [?]
18 comments
Interesting idea, but as often I have to recap to see if I’ve really understood.
You copy the original content in a static html page and format it to maximize CTR.
What I miss is the URL stuff. My blogposts have a url like http://www.XYZ.com/post-name/
How can I overwrite them with a static page ?
Where do I have to save that page ?
Do I have to save the page like this “post-name.php” ?
Thanks in advance
alex
I Don’t know if you already posted this idea, but another suggestion to revitalise old posts is to try to make as much internal links as possible on new posts. This links are from new posts to old post.
Then from time to time, go back to the oldier posts re-read them and internal link (where possible) to the newer ones.
The effect is that when a reader lands on any of your pages, there are chances that he surf back and forward thru your older and newer posts.
ciao
alex
P.S. congrats for breaking the 4oo subscriptions wall !
Alex,
Your situation is even better and easier than mine… where I have to create a static page for mine… all you have to do is create a WordPress PAGE and name it the same to copy the same URL structure… from there you can create a new page template off from the original page.php template and include your adsense and stuff like that.
I’ve to correct what I wrote.
The right structure of my urls is:
http://www.XYZ.com/2007/12/post-name/
So how would a solution looks like ?
ciao
alex
Ouch… that is like the worse case situation.
Now on your server, you have to create a 2007 folder then a 12 folder than a post name folder then a index.php file… yuck!
I don’t know… best situation is when you have your permalink as this:
blogname/ post name/
mine regretfully is blog name/postname.php
Thanks for the solution, it seems pretty simple.
ciao
alex
man, I would really hate to call that a solution because it will take so much time to do that!
Which blog of yours has that permalink structure… if its not too old, you could just bite the bullet and redo your permalink structure. I did that on a few of my blogs including this one… but, was still stupid and didn’t get it just quite right.
If I had it to do over again, on GCDC it would be blogname/postname/ instead of blogname/postname.php
If I had done that… I could have easily overwritten any post with a WordPress page and designed a second page.php template for special monetization use.
Also.. keep in mind too, we are starting to tread back up stream again with manual work… the goal as our bud David would say, AUTOMATTIC! LOL!!!
The point that I miss is: given a structure like blogname/postname/, if i overwrite a old post with a new page, the layout of the new post will be identic to the page template ?
If yes, that means that if you want to put a page, it will look like the static monetization page.
You are sacrifacing the page.php template for the static overwriting articles !
Or is there a way to have two page templates ?
No. You can create as many page templates as you want. If you log in to your WP Dashboard and click write page, look on the right sidebar and you will see a drop down menu to choose a page template.
What I do is use my page.php as a foundation to build other style of static pages. I don’t do this a lot on this blog, but others blogs such as Best Deals Online I do frequently.
Interesting, I didn’t know that.
Actually I can see only “Default Template”, “Archives” and “Links”.
How can I add a new page template ?
On the two newblog I just started with the purpose to utilize haevily the dynopages, I fortunately had choosen the blogname/postname/ format.
My two social blogs have the blogname/year/month/postname/ format, I don’t thing I’m going to change them, but in case I’ll change opinion on some day, what do I have to do ?
Actually I can see only “Default Templateâ€Â, “Archives†and “Linksâ€Â.
How can I add a new page template ?
Good… that is perfect, you are looking in the right spot!
Ok… if you want to add more options, just take a copy of your page.php and edit it to what you like and then re-upload it.
At the very top of your newly created template page you’ll need to add this:
< ?php
/*
Template Name: NAME WHAT YOU WANT
*/
?>
and don’t forget to change your file name from page.php to something different so you don’t accidentally erase your original page.php page.
As far as changing your permalink structure on your social blogs, you go to Options.php pages:
http://www.YOURNAME.com/wp-admin/options-permalink.php and change it there.
With that… you do any of the following:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks
# New page template: ok, understood.
# Change permalink structure: ok, that’s the simple work. The bad news is that on that way, all the backlinks would land on 404 page, unless doing some rewrites on .htacess (which I’ve never opened in my short blogging experience).
Yes! You are correct… that is the “Bite the Bullet” part I mentioned earlier.
Good news is this… I did this about 5 months ago on GCDC… I said, screw it… I am doing it and I lost a bunch of backlinks, etc… but eventually Google re-indexed my stuff and my readers fixed any related links that went 404, so all in all it wasn’t too terrible of an experience.
But… you have to be SOUND in your decision to do a major permalink structure change like that… because YES!!! you will in essence remove every backlink to your blog other than the external links that point to your home page.
Hmmm, great idea. I guess I will look into this.
I’m a little confused on this one. I understand that you, Garry, just took the content from your original post and put it into a html doc. Okay. But what I don’t get from the exchange you’re having with Alexander is how to tell that old post link to go to the html doc? Creating a page using WP doesn’t seem to be an elegant solution to me because some blogs (like mine) have pages listed at the top and if I do that for all my pages, then that means I’d have to alter my nav bar to NOT include pages due to the potential length.
[scratches head]
You can exclude any pages you want from showing up on your nav bar or sidebar, you just have to use the exclude page in your code. Its pretty simple to do.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_pages#Exclude_Pages_from_List
Thank you, Blog Father! LOL
LOL….
I have spoken!!!
Ok.. dude… let me know if that helps… are you going to be doing some bait and switch (pages) on your blog soon?
Joking….
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