Continued from Part Thirty-Six
New to the Series? Start with Part One
Blogosphere: A series
Part Thirty-Seven: Re-using Your Golden Oldies With a Twist
Image: I made this one.
Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!
Erm, wait. Are you getting back to shopping your earlier work again?
Got it in one. That’s exactly what I’m going to do… but for a different reason this time. In fact, by pulling out information from that recent post, I’m demonstrating what this post is all about.
You might want to consider that while some of your readers have been around your Blog since the beginning (or nearly so), many more are new visitors. Placing a Top Posts widget in your sidebar will help direct new eyes to some of your better work. Note that the Top Posts widget is an automatic farming utility that goes by number of page views. UPDATE: That is what it is supposed to do, but in practice, this is not what I see. There appears to be a snag in the top post widgets I’ve seen. They do not always give you the highest rated posts overall, but rather over the last x days where x is unknown and uncontrollable. Down the line if I find a widget that works better, you can count on me publishing the discovery here on UhW.
A Recent Posts and (or) an Archive helps as well.
Image: sherritalley.com
You can also create a “hand-made” Blogger favorites widget which keeps a static list of your best work. This is done by manually choosing your best 5 or 10 posts, making links for them, and putting them into a text widget that can be placed in a highly visible place. While a manual practice, it does allow you to showcase your best stuff.
The reason for all of this is that while a new readers of your Blog might stumble upon your better work through the Blog’s search engine, you are missing a bet if you don’t help them along.
Another way to do this is to link to earlier posts. Consider, when doing that, to change the original post as well so it will link forward to the new one. While external links (into and out of your Blog) are useful in the extreme, those internal links are very helpful as well.
Finally, when (if) you decide to pull old posts from the past and use them in a new post, consider doing so by either of these two ways: 1. Don’t. Just write a post and link to the original, or 2. CHANGE THE ORIGINAL POST. The Search Engines will consider a post a copy—and not improve page search rankings—if it finds one post is exactly line another. The trick is to change at least 20% of the first post, either by moving paragraphs around, or adding or deleting text. NOTE: adding an image might make your post look better, but Search Engines can’t see images. It changes should be in the text of the post.
Uphill Writing 
A bit like the way I go through my ‘life’ searches for more writing material. grin grin. Good post.
I added the Top Posts Widget a week or so ago .
I seem to recall WP saying that it only takes the last 24-48 hours of stats into account in compiling the list.
I like the idea of creating your own Top Posts list manually. Thanks.
Good plan, thanks Rik.
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