I was trolling through my analytics (as I often do when I have a spare moment) recently and noticed something funny.
Even though it’s been more than 6 years since I started this blog, very old posts are still getting traffic, still getting searched and found, like this post on how your music collection can protect your mind.
That post still works for me in a couple of ways, because one of the simplest things I’ve done over the years is create shortcodes in WordPress that are dynamic.
Take a look at the bottom of the post. Even though this post was written 5 years ago, it’s promoting my current newsletter and book. When I change out the short code’s contents in the future, all of my old posts will be updated retroactively, which means the post will continue to work for me, continue to promote current things, even if I never touch the content again.
Accomplishing this is simple: find a blogging plugin for your platform of choice that allows you to insert a shortcode at the end of your posts. If you don’t have one available, consider writing a simple HTML file that you drop on your web server and then include by any standard means of including external content. PHP folks will likely use the include() function. If you’re on WordPress, my recommendation is Shortcode Exec; you’ll find more details here.
Check your analytics for pages and content that go far back, and see if there are opportunities for you to make that content work for you again.
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