Curating Your Best Content in End of the Year Posts
It’s the end of the year, and for many of us that means a frenzy of holiday activity that can leave us scrambling for time to write new blog material. No worries. There are many ways to repurpose your existing content and publish valuable content for your readers.
Instead of creating new content, curate old (but great) posts into helpful lists or round-up posts.
Ideas for End of the Year Posts
Normally, an end of the year post is limited to posts published in that year, but you can do what you like and include every post you’ve ever written when you choose what to include. Either way, get access to some data —either your Google Analytics or the simpler WordPress stats— and find your superlative posts.
Top Posts from the Year could be determined by whatever metric you choose:
- the highest traffic
- the most comments
- the most shares on social media
Or ignore your stats and tell your readers what you think your best content was. Make a list of
- My Favorite Posts of the Year
- The Posts From This Year That I Don’t Want You To Miss
If you are a regular and prolific blogger, you might want to take a month by month approach listing
- My Best Post from Each Month This Year
- My Year in Review in Twelve Blog Posts
If you write about a few key topics, you could create a list of My Best Posts This Year About [Topic]. Do that for each of your most common blog categories.
End of the Year Posts Based on Social Media
Was Pinterest good to you as a blogger this year? Share the love with a wrap-up post listing
- My Most Pinned Posts of the Year
- Posts You Need to Pin
- Posts You Probably Pinned
Or look at your blog through the eyes of Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ with
- My Most Tweeted Posts From This Year
- The Posts Google Plus Loved the Most
- My Posts with the Most Facebook Likes
These kinds of posts give you a chance to brag a little and share your stellar social media stats.
How To Structure End of the Year List Posts
You can gather a list of post titles and link them back to the original posts, but I like to also add the pinnable image I made from each post into my collection. Be sure the images link back to the posts from which they come. People love to click on images, and a string of images will keep them scrolling down to see all your best posts of the year.
To beef up your new post, be sure to offer concise descriptions for each of the posts you are listing. Give your readers a sneak peek and a reason to click over. One format that works well is Q&A. Write a question that your post can answer.
You could also organize the posts chronologically by month or logically by topic.
Do you think these types of posts are cheating? They aren’t! The fact is many readers —even your most loyal readers— sometimes miss a post for one reason or another. And even if someone read it back in March, that doesn’t mean he won’t want to read it again in December or January! If a post is good, it’s still good the second time around. Make the most of your archives, and curate some end of the year posts with your most epic content.
