By making old posts new and and recycling your WordPress archives you will not only keep them producing traffic – but keep making money with them as well!

This is installment #11 in the 30 WordPress Hacks in 30 Days Series! Be sure to view the previous hacks you’ve missed and sign up via RSS or email at the top of the page to make sure you don’t miss the rest of the series!

I’ve written a lot of lengthy articles in this hacks series so far, but here’s one that’s pretty simple. Before I had this plugin I longed for something that would effectively rotate my blog posts out of the archives and back onto the front page of my blog. Not every blog will have a need for this, but I have quite a few blogs, and I can’t always work on every one every day (or even every week). The blog paradigm means that the newest things are on the homepage scrolling down to the oldest, and when the content doesn’t change it makes you blog “stale”.

Being able to recycle your blog posts takes a marketing tip from fast food restaurants. Do you ever notice that certain things “come back” on a regular basis? Every year for Lent, all the fast food restaurants being back the “fish sandwich”. You see McDonald’s bring back the “McRib” and the “Monopoly Game” about once per year. They take things in and out of the rotation to keep it fresh, and if your blog posts stand the test of time, there’s no reason that they can’t be rotated too.

I have a fun site called “Top Jokes that’s been live with jokes for about 8 months or so. I used to posts a joke or more every day, in fact there are now more than 400 jokes. This type of site doesn’t pay very well, as far as a CTR, and the traffic isn’t so high either. But I don’t want to get rid of it because like all web real estate “it grows over time” – I just want to minimize the amount of time I spend on it. I’d like to post maybe a half dozen jokes per month and rotate old jokes from the archives to the homepage at the rate of one per day.

Enter the brilliant plugin by Dagon Design Scheduled Post Shift Plugin for WordPress. It’s a very simple, very easy to use plugin. Once you install and enable it – just set the options:

scheduled post shift options

Just enter the number of hours between post shifts, and at that time it will rotate your oldest post in your WordPress blog to your home page by changing the published date to current time. Once per day enter 24 hours, twice per day 12 hours, every two days enter 48 hours, etc. The second option you can leave blank, but if you enter a category ID only posts from that category will be rotated. You could use this to your advantage in an interesting way by creating a dozen or so posts, and give them dates from a year ago and assign them to a “sponsors” category. Then enable Scheduled Posts Shift for just the “sponsors” category every 24 hours (if you post every day) or whatever your post schedule is to have “recommended” or sponsored items cycle through your home page regularly. This could be a very interesting way to monetize your blog.

In addition – I recommend you read Profitable Previous Posts, so when your old posts are rotated back to your homepage you can ensure that you are getting the most benefit, SEO, and profit from them possible!

However you use it, Scheduled Posts Shift can help you to automatically recycle your WordPress blog posts and keey all that hard work and those archives you’ve built up over time producing both traffic and income for years!

There IS ONE THING that I haven’t toldyou about recycling blog posts and WordPress archives, and that’s what to do about your “Permalinks”. If you’re going to use this hack to recycle blog posts – you have to read hack #12 as well to find out how to change permalink structure seamlessly, because hacks #11 and #12 go hand in hand!

If you have something to add to make this article better, or a question – please be sure to comment now!