
Making featured more than just recent
Traditionally the featured posts on the homepage of your blog are the most recent. This works well if you produce regular posts. However, many of us may only post once or twice a week. If this is the case for you it provides an opportunity to use that featured area for more than the latest post. Why not highlight older posts that deserve being featured again?
Popular posts
Every blog has a handful of posts which seem to consistently drive traffic. These "killer posts" are the ones that get linked to, tweeted about, and generally feature well in search engines.
New users guide
People arriving on your blog for the first time will typically land on a specific post and read it. The question is: what then? How can you keep them and draw them in further. One answer is to create a guide specifically for them. Something that introduces them to all that the site has to offer.
Theme posts
A new user guide targets a specific group, where theme posts target those interested in a specific subject area. The chances are, if you have blogged for a few years you have accumulated a number of posts on related topics. For example, if you are a front end developer you might have written half a dozen posts or more on various aspects of CSS3.
Related posts
Related posts are possibly the most common way of encouraging users to explore your archive. This is probably because so many plugins exist that offer the functionality, not because they are the most effective tool.

Other posts by this author
Obviously, this is only applicable on websites who have multiple authors. However if that is your website, then showing off posts from the archive by the same author is a great way of highlighting old content and helping the user to get to know your contributors better.
Making more of your categories
I always think that category lists are massively under utilized on most blogs, especially considering how prominent they are. Most blogs have categories listed in their sidebar and each post provides a link to the category it is apart of. However, despite these prominent links, the statistics I have seen show few users actually navigate via category. Why is this? I suspect it is because the category pages themselves are normally of little use.
A better use of tags
Tags have so much potential as a way of encouraging users to explore old posts, but too often they are reduced to a tag cloud that few look at. Some blogs attempt to solve this problem by displaying tags associated with a post at the end of the article. Unfortunately this area has so many calls to action—from commenting to sharing on social networks—that tags are often lost in the noise. One solution is to auto link tags as they appear in the copy instead of being bunched at the end. As the user is reading the copy they may well be tempted to explore other posts that contain the same keywords.
Better search
One of the biggest boundaries to users exploring old content on your blog is probably the search functionality. This is because generally speaking the default search capability of most blogging platforms is poor. The limitations of default search comes in two forms. First, many of them only offer very basic search parameters. Second, the results returned often do not highlight keyword phrases leaving users wondering why a particular post appears.

So much potential
Blogs have had an enormous impact on the web, but so much of their value is lost, buried as it is in the depths of an archive. In this post I have tried to urge you to start thinking about how to liberate that lost content. However, the few ideas I have shared are just the beginning. There are opportunities to use everything from email newsletters to "this time last year posts" to show users the depth and breadth of content you can offer.Read Next
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