I recently wrote a blog post that proposed that you should attempt to approach your blog from a new angle in order to better understand your readers and the journey they take on your blog.
In that article I stated that many bloggers approach their blogs through bookmarks or as their browsers homepage, this will undoubtedly take you straight to your blogs homepage or as some of my followers have noted straight to your admin panel. By doing this you are not following a true path through your blog like your readers do.
Your readers will access your blog through referrals or via a search engine, this will mean that they land directly on a post or page. With this in mind, bloggers need to understand how their visitors arrive at their blog and give them what they are looking for.
The best way of tackling this is to use the ideas I put forward in my previous post as well as analyzing your blogs stats to find your 20 top landing posts (The post a user first sees when they access your blog). Once you have your list you need to go through each of those posts and see if they meet the needs of your readers, are they still up-to-date? do they provide links to other related posts? Do they encourage the reader to stay on your blog or subscribe to your feed?
These are just a few of the things that you can look at to optimize old posts, there are plugins that can make things a little easier, such as the related posts plugin that can display links to related posts on all of your blog posts but my advice would be to read through your old posts every couple of weeks.
Many bloggers abandon their blog posts around a week after publishing them, they will usually spend a couple of days tweeting the link and driving some traffic to them but as they start to write new posts the older posts get left behind and forgotten about. Your old blog posts are just as effective as your news posts for generating traffic to your blog so they should not get left behind.
My action point to you from this post is: Look back over 20 of your previous blog posts and ensure that they are up-to-date and link to other relevant sources of information on your blog. Once you have updated the post, tweet the link on twitter and tweet me the link and I will drive some new traffic to it.