First, let me define “recycling blog posts”. It’s when you republish or change the publish date of one of your older posts in order to increase traffic to it or to simply give your readers “new” content for a day. Since your older blog posts are buried way down in your archives, there’s a high possibility that your new readers have not read them yet.
Another thing that makes this method great is that search engines will see your website as “newly updated”, and we all know that search engines love sites that are constantly updated. 😛
So those reasons make recycling blog posts a good idea, right?
Not so. If you repost your old articles, chances are you’ve got outdated information already. Now, people wouldn’t want that, unless you literally rewrite half of your post! I strongly believe that having no content at all for one day is way better than having outdated content. Plus, republishing old posts would only mean one thing, and that is you have no creative or innovative idea in mind on that day!
Another disadvantage is that if you have readers who were with you since day 1 (or week 1), then chances are they already read the article and would not want the same old article on their RSS readers. If they see that you’ve posted your previous article, then they might unsubscribe because thoughts like “Ah, this blogger can’t provide useful content anymore.” would occur in their minds. It’s better to have no increase in subscribers, than to lose 10 or 20 of them in just a single day.
Your Opinions?
What do you think? Short post, I know — it was intended to be short because I just wanted to know your thoughts. I’ll be back tomorrow (probably, if time will permit) to give you some advice on internet marketing, so stay subscribed! Is it a great idea to republish/recycle your blog posts, or do you think your readers would be pissed off if you do that? All thoughts are welcome!
Enjoy. 🙂