Got a 'bad' blog post?
I recently spent some time suggesting that you further optimize and take advantage of your higher traffic blog pages and posts by providing additional value and links to other areas of content around your blog.
Many of you did just that by curating the content a bit and giving those optimal pages even more love.
But what about the lower-trafficked pages and posts? Have you thought about optimizing those as well? Do you even know what they are?
The reason you want to spend some time curating your lower performing blog posts is two-fold:
- It’ll first help you understand why they are the lower performing pages and posts in your blog. Perhaps it was a way off-topic blog post that was generally rejected by your readers and/or search engines. Perhaps it was your a poorly executed blog post or poorly written. Perhaps it was simply really out of character or maybe it’s just a fluke.
- Optimizing them will help elevate content that should have been received better and put it back front and center to your audience. Perhaps it’s simply old content that was created before you had a following? It needs to be resurfaced so that you can take advantage of that valuable resident content. Read more about becoming an expert Blog Post Curator for more information.
Ready to spend some time today optimizing? Here’s what you should do:
A beautiful thing.
Discover Your Low Traffic Posts
The first thing you should do is figure out exactly what the lower performing blog posts are, right?
You can do this in a number of ways, but one of the easiest is simply visiting your WordPress Stats page via the JetPack plugin interface.
What you then can click is the “This Week” button on the right:
Should be on the right side of your stats page via Jetpack.
And then you’ll click “All Time” on the next page:
Ready to be surprised?
And then you can scroll all the way down to see your lower performing blog posts:
Hmm. Interesting.
Remember, don’t be too discouraged as you will always have a “loser” in the bunch – in other words, you’ll always have a lowest performing blog post, even if it’s 10′s of thousands of visits (I wish…)!
Generally I was a bit surprised at the highlighted blog posts about Innovation since it was one of my favorite blog posts and an idea that I’m asked quite a bit. The other blog lower blog posts I could care less about and they rightly deserve to be at the bottom. Heck, I admit that not all of my blog posts are super-duper-awesomesauce!
For kicks, there’s one other way that I would recommend for you to find your lower performing blog posts and that is to use Google Analytics. You can first choose the appropriate date-range (from the beginning of your blog):
I started in September of last year so I chose a date around then.
Then you’ll hit View Report, and then View Full Report next on two separate screens:
First screen...
Second screen...
And then you’ll head to the end of the number of queries and work your way backwards:
Time to find the low performing pages and posts.
You may have to scroll back a few clicks to find the right ones, especially if Google Analytics is capturing non-static blog posts and pages like search queries (if you’re using something like Google Custom Search, which I highly recommend for a blog).
You could discover a lot of other information about your posts via Google Analytics as well.
Gah! I hate low traffic blog posts!
What to Do with Low Performing Blog Posts
If you find that your low performing blog posts are ones that need some serious love and attention then there are a few options for you:
- Add, Edit content – First you can add more content to the blog post. Make sure it’s relevant and helpful. Perhaps your opinion has changed or you now have a different perspective. Or, maybe you have to edit that content so that it has a better flow – maybe you just have some bad grammar or the blog post generally doesn’t make enough sense in terms of cohesion – edit it!
- Add some media – Maybe it was missing a picture or you want to now add a video or related media. Perhaps it was just missing a bit of flare that captured people’s attention.
- Calls to action – Perhaps you were missing a call to action, or an element that challenged your readers to engage? Perhaps you didn’t have enough readers then who cared about it so you just need to resurface it now to new readers?
- Re-Market it – If it’s up to snuff and it’s ready to be advertised again you should seek to share it via Twitter or Facebook. If you’re not interested in profiling it so another easy way to promote it a bit more indirectly is to publish a newer blog post that references the older post as a source; or even quote it and refer people back to the post for more detail.
- Engage – Perhaps you just forgot to reply to the comments and now after re-marketing it you’ll do just that (and then some).
Your lower performing blog posts have a lot of value and it’s worth it to take some time to curate them and to bring them up to par (if you’re willing, able, and interested).
Become an expert curator of of your own blog content and you’ll reap the rewards of reinvigorated traffic. Heck, you might even take away a few learnings so that you won’t repeat the mistakes that made those blog posts perform so low in the first place!
So what are you waiting for? Hop to it!
Hey John,
A bit off topic, but I use your Standard theme. How do I get the subscribe to comments checkbox like yours?
It’s a plugin called “Subscribe to comments reloaded”. You can find it by searching plugins.
Thanks Dustin. =)
dustin is awesome.
John is awesomer.
… no…!
thanks man! i use the regular one… not reloaded.
Feel free to send your “low-performing” blog posts my way! I’d love to have numbers like that!
ha!
Great stuff.
I’ve never thought to go into jetpack and look at my “alltime” report. That’s great.
I’m going to spend some time this week upgrading some of my low posts!
Thanks, John!
on ricksmith.com?
I just did an initial ‘once-over’ of my Google Analytics… it looks like there’s a lot of “junk” in there that aren’t posts. How do you sort through the clutter?
you can do filter searches… and then you can do campaigns for specific returns – i’ll cover this a bit later.
sweet action!
Great tips brother. Loving what Church Analytics does for our little slice of the net.
Great Tips (as always). I have several posts which I just loved and were completely on topic with no comments to speak of…I’ll be using your tips this week to update some old posts and get them up to par.
sweet! let me know how it goes!
John,
This is on point. Man, you’re on the pulse of where I’m focusing-content, content, content.
thanks dewitt.