Make Money Online by Editing Your Old Blog Posts
Here is a great tip that will show you how you can make money online by editing your old blog articles. The format of blogs are somewhat entertaining. Blog authors work hard on publishing such amazing content only for it to become buried alive with newer content. But really is that the case?
It is and it isn’t. While newer content does bury older content from additional exposure from regular readers, also a second life of your content is born and that is in the search engines.
Take a look at this screen shot, you may click on it to open a new window or tab to view the full size:
Does anything jump out at you in the screen shot? Perhaps not, well look again, this time click on this screen shot:
… as retrieved on May 23, 2008.
I wrote this post on January 28th, 2008.
See where I am going with this yet?
One more screen shot and tell me if anything jumps out at you:
Are you seeing where I am going with this? I wrote a post on January 28th, 2008 titled, How Can I Run Over 100 Blogs and Live To Tell, and Google lasted crawled that post on May 23, 2008.
Once you have a page indexed, Google will constantly check for updates. Here is another screen shot of a different post:
Article was published on Feb. 28th 2007 (YES OVER ONE YEAR AGO) and last crawled on May 23rd. The post is a PR2.
- How Many eBook Downloads Does It Take To Screw In A Light Bulb?
Published Feb 27th, 2008 | Last crawled on June 1st, 2008 | PR4
- Read the post.
- View Google’s Cache of the post. - Five Tips on How To Increase FeedBurner Subscribers
Published on Feb 25th, 2008 | Last crawled on June 2nd, 2008 | PR3
- Read the post.
- View Google’s Cache of the post.
The list could go on and on and on. I have over 700 high quality and content rich articles on my blog and that largely attributes to why I get so much search engine traffic.
How Do I Make Money Online Editing Old Posts?
I think by now you can already see the endless possibilities; however, let me provide you with a few off the wall brainstorm ideas:
- Revise and edit your content to focus more on promoting a product. When Google visits your older posts and see that there is an update in the content it will no longer consider it to be a stale page. That reason alone is part of why comments on an older post keep it alive.
- Seed internal links that point to new sections on your blog. Since the time you published your post, you have written newer content that covers or expands on the things that you may have only touched on briefly in your original article. Editing your old post and seeding links that point to newer content written will help continue building internal site PageRank.
- Create a static page while maintaining the permalink structure. WordPress blogs produce dynamic URLs which don’t actually have a physical location on the hard drive of your server. What that means is that you can go in and physically upload a static HTML page using the same url structure as the url structure of the WordPress post.I wrote a post called YouTube Layouts many months ago, but decided to overwrite that with a REAL cheesy static HTML page to promote Viral Video Fever while also slapping a few AdSense Ads up. Again, this USED TO BE A BLOG POST, and it still is… the minute I delete this physical HTML file from my server it would immediately go back to my original WordPress Post.
How Do I Edit Old Posts?
This is very simple:
- Log in to your WordPress Dashboard
- Click Manage
- Click Posts
- Use the drop down menu to display only posts from a selected month.
- Click filter.
After you filter your posts by month, simply visit each post and look for the PageRank.
If you have established some PageRank on that post, you might consider editing it.
Also if you’d like to check to see when the last time Google has crawled your post, simply copy the full post URL and then visit www.google.com and type in site: and then paste the URL after that.
It should look something like:
site:http://www.garryconn.com/youtube-layouts.php
Here is a screen shot:
… after you click search you will get a page like this:
… look for this: Cached – Similar pages – Note this
Click Cached
After you click Cached, you’ll be presented with the page that tells you the last time Google crawled that page.
If you get a page like this:
… that means your page hasn’t been indexed in Google. And if it is an older post, that means there is a problem. You should then give that page some love and perhaps write a new post on your blog and seed a link to your older post that hasn’t been indexed, or ask a friend to write a review about your old post, or perhaps try submitting that old post into Digg, StumbleUpon, etc… and maybe someone will end up blogging about it and seeding a link for you that way.
Popularity: 6% [?]
46 comments
Great post Garry. There is a lot of value in going back to revise old posts to make them more valuable today. One thing that I like to do is to see what terms from that post are generating search engine traffic. If I am being indexed for “blue sleek widgets” but my post never uses this exact phrase, I add that exact phrase in my posts. This allows me to become more relevant for that keyword and I move up the SERPs.
sorry if i was wrong. but you have posted this articled about some weeks ago right? or it’s just my dejavu. but somehow i feel that i have read your article about it. and that time you talked about youtube template too.
you make it be a landing page. but sorry if im wrong
good post. you have to make a more post like this. see your feedburner chicklet number increase?
WOw I never thought of reverse engineering my own blog like that and turning posts into pages.
SO when I decide to upload a static page to upload to my blog directory.
ie: http://making-money-blogging.com/blog/static-html-page.html
and you say it replaces to post with the same name
http://making-money-blogging.com/blog/static-html-page
Man I aughta check my posts for PR and chae dates a little more often.
What a very cool tip
Gary this is awesome! I have always wondered about editing old posts and whether or not if was a good idea. Would you suggest editing the time stamp as well and republishing it? Or bad idea?
Anyway, thanks for the great read. I appreciate the value you give here on your site. Perhaps the most value that I have received from sites like this!
Pat
BTW…you just went on my google home page!
Garry, can you just give me a few more details? When you edit old posts, do you worry about what percentage of text is updated? Do you rewrite the whole article? And do you notice a significant increase in SE traffic to those pages after the changes?
Wow Garry, I must say that it’s been a very long time since I’ve actually been impressed with an MMO post lol. Except from maybe the part where you teach us how to edit posts. That added some humor spice to it. But seriously, thanks, I’m gonna tweak some shit right now.
Fred that is an excellent tip. Thank you so much for sharing that with everyone and it makes perfect sense. If a traffic report showing a certain page is getting traffic for certain keywords, it’s a great idea to go back and figure out why and see if you can improve on it further.
Hi Jacky, Who knows… with around 700 articles, I have probably covered everything once or twice by now. I have to consider revisiting certain topics though to help out new readers. But to answer your question, no… I don’t think I have covered this prior to this article.
Regarding the FeedBurner increase. Actually I haven’t had an increase, for some reason (FeedBurner doesn’t have an explanation) many of my email notify accounts become inactive and I had to recheck them manually. So my FeedBurner numbers are actually back to normal, not increased. Although I do hope to continue to increase my numbers.
You might have it mixed up, let me explain it better.
If you have a blog post where the address is:
Yourname.com/blog/postname.php
If you look in FTP you’ll see that that location doesn’t not exist physically on your server hard drive.
i.e. /home/public_html/blog/postname.php
So, what I do is create a static HTML page. If you know HTML you can use notepad.exe to make the page, or if you’re more comfortable you can use programs like FrontPage or DreamWeaver.
After you make the static html page, make sure to name the file the same name as the virtual (or dynamic file)
postname.php
When you upload this file it will automatically overwrite the virtual reference, yet WordPress will still consider it to be a post. This newly updated static page will still show up in your archives, WordPress search etc…
Hope that better explains.
Garry, I remember a previous post you did about half a year back where you mentioned about editing older posts. I think you said editing the trackbacks to new website urls would bring more traffic
-MIke
There are limited reasons why a blog author would want to change the timestamp on a post. One reason why I do from time to time is to bump the post back to the top because for some reason it never got indexed. I never do that on my personal blog as everything seems to get indexed.
I am sure there are a few more reasons why a publisher would want to edit the time stamp, but for me that is the only reason why I have done it in the past. Kind of like if you create a post in a forum and no one replies, a lot of people will go back to their post and reply to it with “BUMP” which basically brings their thread back to the top of the forum in hopes for a second life.
There would be no purpose of editing the time stamp under these conditions. The page is already indexed and getting hit frequently by Google and its very healthy. The purpose of editing the post is to freshen it up a little and use the juice on that page to seed more links internally within the inner structure of your blog.
There are ways to seed links automatically such as using one of the various “related posts” WordPress plugins available. These plugins constantly change the links on each post based on newer content you publish on your blog.
Another really easy way to plug links into your posts is to use another WordPress plugin called aLinks. I must warn you though, that this plugin was part of the cause of my major crash I had about two weeks ago. While I’ll admit it wasn’t the sole reason for the crash, it did play its part in it though.
I had added too many links into the tables. Doing that coupled with the amount of traffic I get in addition to all the other plugins I had installed made my database very inefficient and lead to my blog finally coming to a halt. aLinks should be fine as long as you don’t add anywhere over 75 to 100 links, assuming that you don’t have a lot of traffic and that you also don’t have a lot of other plugins that modify your tables in MySQL.
Do you mean that you added my RSS feed to your iGoogle Home Page? If so, wow.. way cool and thank you.
Actually if you look at the first comment from Fred, that blueprints exactly what I do. I use Google Analytics to see what keywords are generating traffic. I am aware of top performers and I’ll visit those pages and observe the content. I’ll also look at the strength of competition for the keywords as well. All in all, I try to conclude how I ranked well for these certain keywords on these certain post pages.
From there I take what I concluded and apply it to other posts in attempt to strengthen my ranking for words that don’t rank quite as well as others. While these words do get me some traffic as seen in Analytics, I know I can get more if these pages were to rank just a tad bit better.
For the most part I never completely rewrite a post entirely. What I will do is deliver the chosen keyword much sooner in the post and wrap logical and meaningful content around it so that it adds value to the page being edited while also better enabling me to rank better for the targeted keyword or phrase.
You’d be amazed at the number of noobs that visit my blog. I know my Analytics like the back of my hand and unfortunatly I think I do the mass majority of folks that stumbled unto my blog a disservice by not providing the simple things that many people assume others already know.
This month has been one of the largest noobie attraction months for GCDC yet. It seems that there has been a huge spike in the number of new bloggers as well. So, all in all, its a balancing act and its one that seems to be working well. I am able to entertain my seasoned and more experienced readers with information such as how to edit a post, while also complimenting the noobie who has been trying to figure out how to do it for hours if not days. LOL!!!
I don’t remember… if you can find it, plug the link here in the comments.
and now it hits 1k mark.
congrats
Hey Garry the old post was a simple….. find an old post that gets traffic and add better adsense trick, I believe.
Anyway this is better….. It really is something I should look into on my blog. I have really been neglecting SEO and have to develop a keyword plan.
Do you target 1 or two keywords on this blog? If so is it worth going back to popular old posts and trying to write those keywords into them?
PS…. when did the new design hit!! ha ha you jst can’t rest
It’s very clean though.
thanks very much for your tips , I really appreciate it.
Thanks once again
Great info once again, I never even thought about doing that, though I’ve wanted to get some “loving” to some older posts. I usually just link back to them from a newer posts.
One question, about getting pages indexed, is there certain steps we can take to make this happen, or is it basically just a natural progression? Does it usually take a “general” amount of time, or is it different for each page?
I guess the question is do I need to take any extra steps to get pages indexed?
This is great advice, Garry. I have one page in particular that brought mega-traffic but has now fallen off. I could easily go back and relink to new pages and even add comments and more content. I think I will do that today!
Together, we are stronger.
Vicki Flaugher
P.S. I think I remember a wordpress plug in being available to easily create a static page…in case people aren’t dreamweaver/frontpagers, FYI.
Hey Garry,
Take a look at my latest post about a real cool graphical search tool. It returns scrolling images of website screenshots.
Works great and it’s free.
LinkMoney.org
I don’t know if there is a way to search cached images for old Blog posts, but it is excellent for what’s happenin’ now!
Rich
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Hey Garry, great to see doing well. I have been just busy with work but just reading through your posts and this is again a gem! I have just added a ‘recently updated’ section in my sidebar to showcase my older posts as soon as they are updated. That’ll help not just with search engines but with my regular readers too. For eg. I noticed a lot of people landing in my running Firefox 2 & 3 together post from Google. That is something even a current reader would be interested and now it appears updated in my sidebar and maybe breathe some life back into them.
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[...] Make Money Online by Editing Your Old Blog Posts A great tip from Garry Conn that will show you how you can make money online by editing your old blog posts. [...]
hey i have also noticed this same but was confused on how to get Google re-index those pages
will try this way out and lets get the best for our site
Great tip! Thanks for sharing!
Great tips. I'll try it. Thanks
its a new tips for me, and i need to learn more in here.thank you very much
This is great info…I always wondering that how i can reincarnate old pages.
That’s actually so smart, I caught on after the 2nd screenshot. I’ve started revising some of my well indexed older blog posts (8 months+) So I’ll let you know how it turns out, subscribed*
That is one of the best ideas I’ve seen in awhile – will definitely be trying this strategy. Thanks! btw, thanks for being a dofollow blog, it’s nice to see a blog appreciate comments
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