I have found a forgotten treasure trove of blog post ideas.
Sometimes the obvious is just too obvious to notice.
Let me explain. A couple of months ago I moved (this) my very old blog to a new home. Well, to a new domain name that seemed like a good idea at the time.
It gave me the chance to update lots of boring technical stuff like https and a new theme and everything you are probably not interested in at all. But I did it anyway.
That I have moved my blog at least four times in the last ten years should have made me more practised, but as with all things that move on the Internet, there were moving pains and lots of them.
I don’t know how many times I said, “oops!” or worse. The word smooth never seems to collocate with the word move, when it comes to technology.
Anyway, after a few weeks of agony, here I am with my new domain name, new, well, old-cum-new blog and everything is just peachy.
So what do I put on my wonderful new blog?
Once everything was, as I said, running technically peachy, it struck me that it was time to get back to my real job of being a blogger. It was about then that the writer’s, or blogger’s block, set in with a vengeance. What the hell am I going to write about?
Days passed as I waited for the lightning bolt of inspiration to strike me. Alas though, I remained unstruck.
With time on my hands, due the writing time I had failed to occupy, I did what all bored people do. I surfed the Net, dallied with social media and played Scrabble on my phone.
When I got bored with all that, I went back to my blog and tweaked the theme a little. A change of colour here, a change of font there and even a little toying with a bit of CSS, just because I can.
However, it was when I got so deathly bored that I began sorting through my blog categories that the lightning bolt hit. I noticed a category I used called ‘dated’, which I used to file old posts that were out of date, or that needed to be refreshed.
I did a search of all my blog posts for the ones listed under this category. Uuuhhggg, what? My search returned over 450 posts!
Eureka, I’ve found it!
Many of my dated posts were, of course, from years back, but some of the topics were still very relevant today. However, they badly needed updating, refreshing and above all else, they really needed correcting for grammar and typo errors.
For the last couple of years, I have used Grammarly to help me avoid making silly errors in my blog writing, but these posts pre-dated my use of online tools to improve the quality of my blog writing.
As soon as I tackled the first of my old dated blog posts, I knew what the immediate future held for me.
Oh dear, dear me! Typos, grammatic errors, and a truly awful featured image. Where was my brain all those years ago?
Well, it was a different time and a different place and perhaps one that was not as critical as it is today. Or, more likely, I was not as reproving of myself back then, would probably be a more honest assessment.
Self-admonished or not, I knew what I had found. A gold mine!
450 blog posts that were very much worth sifting, sorting, perhaps trashing, but a very large proportion of them only needed updating, expanding, refreshing, correcting and embellishing with a new featured image or two.
I’m getting lots of new traffic to my new blog now!
Wonder of wonders. Soon after discovering my long lost gold mine of blog posts, and getting to work on making the old, refreshingly new, my new blog is gaining a lot of new organic and social media-referred traffic. The posts I had labelled as ‘dated’ were just that and rightfully, never to be found or read again.
But now, however, many of my old posts have gained a new lease of life after a full re-write and update, along with a thorough grammar and spellcheck and a newly designed feature image.
My long list of dated posts is now my blogging gold mine. And I’m mining hard!
So, are you mining your old blog posts for gold?
