by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
“How much traffic could you reasonably expect from blog posts that are a couple of years old?” asked Kaiholo Hale, a Maui vacation rental expert.
My answer? A bunch of good traffic if the blog post is relevant. I’ll show you two of my little workhorses:
- Google “Apartment Loans San Diego” and you’ll see that my post from December, 2006 is ranking second or third. I’ve funded about ten loans, most of them second mortgages, in the past 3 years from that blog post. I only make about $1,000 from each loan but they’re really easy to do. Few mortgage brokers have access to the capital I have to make these loans.
- Google “Short Sales and PMI” to find that I rank first for that term. The information on that post is some 10-12 years old so I need to update it. Still, this post generates about a dozen inquiries every month. I had to figure out how to make this post pay me so I built an opt-in email list for people who sold their homes via short sale. That led to another list for people who lost the home through foreclosure. Last fall, I stratified the lists by sale date so that I can “tickle” them as we approach their qualification date. Over 200 people have signed up for these newsletters but only s few dozen are still reading them. I add about five each month and expect that only one of those five will be “with me” in 2-3 years.
Two little work horses should produce $50,000 annual GCI for me in 2011. I can do much better than that. Greg Swann once remarked that you can return to old blog posts and “polish them up”. You can update them, double check your grammar and spelling, and try to add some conversion tools or calls to action so that they can turn into GCI for you. Let’s see what I might do with my two:
The apartment loans post is a quick conversion. People landing on that page want a loan and they want it quickly. I think I can add some recent loans funded with terms and scenarios published. I dare not mess with the original content so I’ll probably add “updated information”, as a paragraph header, below the original post. I think a conversion link, titled “Apartment Loan Guidelines“, which leads to a page with a loan request form, will do the job.
The short sales/PMI post is informational and solicits a long-term customer. I think some seduction is in order there, along with a few testimonials. I think I don’t want to mess with the original content, even though it’s outdated, but I’ll take any suggestions. I’m organizing my content, to deliver via an “email course”, called “Countdown to Re-Ownership”. It will be a more interactive approach integrating monthly newsletters, quizzes, and an offer of an annual credit report. I know more people are reading that blog post than contact me and have two problems I want to solve:
- How do I convert more traffic to subscribe to the “course”?
- Why am I losing 80% of the readers after twelve months?
After I update the content, I can build a bunch of fresh back links to the specific blog posts, anchored in text identical to the search terms, to perpetuate or enhance the SERP ranking. I don’t see the value of writing a whole new blog post when I have strong traffic and SERP rankings on the old ones. If I’m wrong, please point that out to me.
Kaiholo, thank you for posing the rhetorical question. I know old blog posts aren’t useless but wonder how I can make them more useful…
…to me!
Nick Bastian says:
I would say the only way for an “old blog post” to be useless would be for it to have been useless when originally posted. 🙂
ie: poor information, poor structure, poor overall reach etc.
As you know so well, a good blog post can be like a fine wine…
July 10, 2010 — 2:38 pm
Kaiholo Hale says:
LOL, I was about to comment when I noticed back on the very first line how my comment was what prompted your post. First, congrats, you certainly have great stats to prove your point. Second, I can’t possibly reply as I don’t have that type of expertise or background. But kudos, really. You, sir, made me eat my foot. 🙂
July 10, 2010 — 8:52 pm
Brian Brady says:
“You, sir, made me eat my foot”
Not my intention. You Sir, made me do my homework today. There really is a lesson in that rhetorical question you posed. I know which posts people read because they describe them to me. If we know what people want, we can give them more of it.
Sometimes, comments like yours inspire offline marketing campaigns, too. I forgot how easy those little second-lien apartment loans were. I don’t make a bunch but I can close them quickly. Tonight, I dug up an old mailing list I had, printed off some cheap postcards, and will have them out in Monday’s mail. I KNOW that mailing will be worth a couple of grand.
July 10, 2010 — 10:34 pm
Marc Knight says:
When it comes to blogs, the newest usually gets the most attention. The latest post sits on top of the page, where readers see it first. Older posts get pushed down and as more posts come in they fall off the page and into the archives. As evidenced by Brian’s ‘little work horses’
old posts are still valuable though few people will sift through a blog’s archives to read the older posts. However, if your post has real value in terms of content, you can make the a few tweaks here and there as pointed out by Brian and you still got yourself a winner…Thanks for sharing, very informative indeed.
July 12, 2010 — 9:01 am
Teri Lussier says:
Are old blog posts useful? Yes, of course I remember Ashley Dupre.
July 14, 2010 — 8:32 pm
Joe says:
Your comment about linking to old blog posts is a good one. As long as other sites find it important enough to link to, it appears relevant. The more authority it has, the more likely Google will maintain its ranking.
July 15, 2010 — 10:53 am