Monetizing your Older Posts with Affiliate Links

A few days ago I asked whether affiliate links might be a better solution for small and new bloggers. While I spoke mostly about the potential earning power of affiliate links for bloggers with low impression counts, I also hinted briefly about the value of truly contextual affiliate marketing.

While it can be easy to add links to your new posts, in a lot of cases you may already have untapped resources buried deep inside your blog's archives. Why let old posts, especially old posts containing information on products, go un-monetized? In this post I'm going to cover a couple quick tips for identifying and editing old posts to raise their potential value in your monthly blog earnings.

Identifying Valuable Posts

If you're using stats services like SiteMeter or Google Analytics, or plugins like Popularity Contest, now is the time to start looking at your more popular posts. Each of these options will give you slightly different perspective on posts and help you determine which may be the most deserving of a quick update.

SiteMeter

If you click through to your SiteMeter stats you'll see a series of links on the left side of the page which will connect to lists of various different posts on your website. Of particular interest right now are your Entry Pages - this brings up a list of all the recent pages where visitors landed. These are prime spots for adding affiliate links and referrals.

What's also helpful here is the link through to visitor details. If a referrer is listed, especially if it's Google or another search engine, you can get a sense of what drove the visitor to your page. If the search term was a product you're in luck - just update the post appropriately for that product and you're set to go.

Google Analytics

While I have recently come to love Google Analytics it has long been a resource which offered me more trepidation than information. There is so much STUFF on the Analytics page that it can be extremely overwhelming for new users. After much experimentation I'm starting to understand it a lot better and now I've worked out a pretty decent method for using it to monetize older content. The trick is just understanding where what is.

In Google Analytics you're not looking for Entry Pages so much as Content Performance. I recommend looking at your Top Content at least once a week and trying to identify any potential monetary streams. Remember that if you have a post which could include an affiliate link, and it appears on your top content list, then it could hold some monetary value.

Popularity Contest

The last option I'm going to suggest for now is one that I had a good experience with last night. Alex King's Popularity Contest is a plugin for WordPress that gives you a snapshot of your most popular content. While it's original intent was really just to showcase these posts (in your sidebar for example) you can easily use it as a quick glimpse at what content is popular for what category.

Once installed Popularity Contest adds a page to your Dashboard which lists popular posts across the site as well as in each category. While you can certainly use this to identify posts that perform well overall, the category aspect is where I'd like to draw your attention. By looking at top posts per category you can do some slightly broader affiliate integration. I could easily add some quick links to my top gadget posts - or I could rewrite some of these posts to mention specific products that might sell.

One post of mine (filed under Gaming) which was receiving a lot of recent traffic involved information from X06. In the post I spoke briefly about Gears Of War and BioShock - last night I updated the links on that page and overnight I've seen a good deal of click throughs to the new affiliate links that I incorporated.

While you can certainly add and banners to your most trafficked pages / posts I recommend sticking with the contextual route. If you have an old post where you list your favorite TV shows, update the list to include newer shows (making it more current) while also adding links to DVD box sets. This will not only increase the chances of someone clicking through and buying a product but will also give you plenty of practice editing and updating posts for better use of keywords.

I also taking the time to reflect upon your old posts and see if you can link to newer content. Placing links in your older, high performance, posts that point to newer lower performing ones may provide a nice boost. Deep linking is always a great practice - why not use your older posts to leverage the content of your newer ones?