8 Simple Tips to Growth Hack Your Top Performing Posts

By Charlie Patel May 02, 2019 0 Comments
Growth Hack Top Performing Posts
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Growth hacking your best performing posts is not something we do or talk about frequently. In fact, I’d bet that 98% of bloggers rarely ever go back to old posts with the intent to enhance them to squeeze more juice.

I had to do exactly this task yesterday and want to share the most actionable methods with the community. Luckily, these hacks don’t require you to be overly technical or have any programming knowledge.

What are the benefits of growth hacking your top-performing posts?

There are several benefits to optimizing posts that are already performing well:

  • More traffic. By the end of this post, your blog will be in a position to potentially generate an additional 10 – 30% page views.
  • Save time. By optimizing existing posts, you don’t have to spend time brainstorming or writing new content. Every blogger knows that enhancing a post is a much quicker exercise than starting a new post starting at a blank screen.  #easywin
  • Avoid writer’s block. No need to feel guilty about producing new content or procrastinating about the next amazing piece when you can be just as productive polishing up old content 🙂
  • Enhance overall page authority. The top performing content already has strong organic and social signals. Therefore, such quick optimizations and resharing can increase page authority. 
  • Consistent results. Millions of new blog posts are published daily. That’s a lot more competition vying for the same eyes. If you’d like to continue getting the same or better results from these top performers, it’s worthwhile to spend a few minutes to revisit them.
  • Learn more about your audience. By studying the best performing posts, you’ll immediately know what resonates with readers. Use that information to determine what to write about next or how to address gaps in your content strategy.
  • Write less. Promote more. Promoting your best performing content is likely to garner more attention, traffic, and shares from folks who originally did not see it. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all limit the visibility of your posts to only a small percentage of your followers therefore it’s very likely not all your followers have seen your prior posts. Practice the 80/20 rule!

Bottom line: You don’t have anything to lose, but potentially a LOT to gain. 

How to Identify Your Top Performing Posts

Identifying the best posts begins with data, and if you know anything about me, you know I’m a huge data geek. Data never lies! More importantly, it reveals opportunities to capitalize on content that you’ve already created.

There are many different tools available to help you easily analyze and identify your most valuable posts but for our purposes, we’ll keep things simple and free by using Google Analytics. Your blog likely already has the tracking code installed so there’s lots of data to sift through. Let’s dive in…

  1. Go to Google Analytics and log in.
  2. Use the dropdown on the top left to select the correct website property if you have more than one.
  3. On the top right, select the appropriate date range. I recommend performing 2 separate analyses. The first to comprise the last 12 months, and the second to cover only the last 3 months (or 1 month).
  4. Click on Behavior tab on the left pane.
  5. Click on Site Content > Landing Pages

The screen will look like this:

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At this point, the data table will display your most popular posts (and pages) that drive the most traffic for the time period selected. We’re focused on blog posts, so disregard any static pages.

Take note of the top 5 – 10 best posts. Depending on your blog, its niche, and the amount of content and traffic it receives, the data will vary. However, it is common for your top posts to nearly generate 50% of all traffic or page views as shown in my example screenshot below.

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Perform the same analysis on a longer / shorter timeframe to avoid any anomalies. For example, a blog post that has existed for a year is likely to have more traction than the one you published 2 months ago. Additionally, take into account attribution, promotions, or advertising campaigns that may skew the data.  

Assuming you’ve now identified approximately 5 – 10 of your top performers, let’s move forward. Though, you can do the following steps for as many articles as you want.

Growth Hack Your Best Posts

Now that you’ve determined which of your articles are performing well, it’s time to enhance or repurpose the content. 

#1 – Link strategically

Check external links: Since the web is always changing and sites disappear or change URLs, you’ll want to do the following:

  • ensure all outgoing links are valid or redirect to live pages
  • replace any links that are dead / 404
  • add any links that add value to the post

Add internal links: The selected posts are your best performing posts already getting views so this is a great opportunity to add a few appropriate links to other content on your site that deserves visibility. By doing this, we also reduce the bounce rate on your site and provide the readers with other articles they might find interesting.

Pro tip: When considering internal linking, choose recent articles so that fresh content can be surfaced to such visitors. A good rule of thumb is to add internal links the visitor is most likely to click. 

#2 – Add fresh information

Considering that the web is constantly changing, it’s likely that things have changed. For example, if you published a post in 2016 with tips on how to use Instagram to promote your e-commerce shop, there are huge changes that have materialized on the platform since that time. Find such opportunities to keep the content current and valuable by updating accordingly. 

Pro tip: Help old and new users recognize the value of your updated content by appending the phrase ‘Updated for 2019’ to the title or at the top of the post. Though, do not change the slug URL or the title itself.

#3 – Add a targeted CTA or lead magnet

A key insight revealed by top-performing posts is they highlight your visitor’s pain points. This is an excellent opportunity to segment or drill down your offers to that specific audience.

For example, Hubspot displays a targeted call-to-action (CTA) at the bottom right of almost every post that is specific to the target audience’s interests. Sales content triggers a sales-focused CTA. (link)

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You can also use top-performing posts to link to landing pages or lead magnets which is quite common across Hubspot’s website. For example, in the image below you’ll notice the title of the blog posts also contextually matches the opt-in located within the body of the post itself.

Hubspot Growth Hacking Example
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Pro tip: Pop-ups work best when they appear 30 seconds to a minute after the visitor lands on the page. You might also want to test pop-ups that appear after users scroll closer to the end of the post. If you need a great list building tool that’s FREE, use AddThis. Their team has been releasing amazing features lately including social sharing, popups, and related posts to engage visitors. A cool platform you might want to check out, especially if you have a WordPress website, is Elementor. A popular website builder, Elementor boasts a nifty popup builder that enables you to create popups without having to code.

#4 – Update title tags and meta descriptions

Search engines are the primary source of traffic. Therefore, take some time to optimize the title tag and meta description to improve search engine rankings. This is what people see before landing on your post via a search.

  • Add keywords or related terms driving the traffic
  • Include your primary keyword in your title tag (limit to 70 characters)
  • Revise your meta description is informative (limit to 150 characters)
  • Eliminate unnecessary words

Pro tip: Glean insights from the titles and meta descriptions of the posts that are ranking above you in search results especially for the top keywords driving traffic to your post. Edit accordingly.  

#5 – Add or update headings

Search engines are the primary source of traffic. Therefore, take some time to optimize the title tag and meta description to improve search engine rankings. This is what people see before landing on your post via a search.

  • Add keywords or related terms driving the traffic
  • Include your primary keyword in your title tag (limit to 70 characters)
  • Revise your meta description is informative (limit to 150 characters)
  • Eliminate unnecessary words

Pro tip: Glean insights from the titles and meta descriptions of the posts that are ranking above you in search results especially for the top keywords driving traffic to your post. Edit accordingly.  

#6 – Reshare articles

After Google, social networks are the largest source of referral traffic for most bloggers. You probably consider it a no-brainer to share your old, top-performing content on social media. However, we see that the majority of content creators only share their posts only once at the time they initially publish. 

There’s enough to do after publishing that ‘resharing an old post’ does not make it to the top of the list. Now is a good time to reshare these articles, schedule a few tweets, and queue them for future shares.  

Reshare older posts on social media with Triberr
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Pro tip: If you share posts from Triberr, you can reshare or reschedule older posts with a simple click of a button as shown above.

#7 – Add relevant images and YouTube video

To add more context and value, find opportunities to add relevant images to the article. When adding images, ensure you specify the image title and alt text for maximum SEO benefit.  

Furthermore, if you can produce a video, I highly recommend uploading it to YouTube and then embedding the video within the post. Google owns YouTube, and they love each other and that’s especially noticeable in search results.

If producing a video is too time-consuming, embed a relevant video by a third party. 

#8 – Compress Images

Google’s ranking factors include page speed. Since we already know that our selected posts are top performers, anything we can do to further optimize them is a positive ROI. Therefore, it’s worthwhile to spend a few minutes to optimize images. Here’s a quick method to optimize the images:

  1. Review every image in your post.
  2. Download the images.
  3. Upload the images on TinyPNG which will compress them without losing quality. Do not be deterred by the name – it processes JPGs too.
  4. Replace the images with the compressed images.

Alternatively, there are WordPress plugins that handle this aspect automatically such as Smush Image Compression and Optimization or EWWW Image Optimizer.

Pro tip: Take this opportunity to analyze data using tools like Google’s PageSpeed tools as well as Google’s Optimize which can help you optimize your user’s experience and increase visitors’ time on site.

Google's PageSpeed Growth Hacks
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The best blog posts are gifts that truly keep on giving. It all comes down to how well you enhance your content, add value, and leverage these simple growth hacks.

Do you have any growth hacking tips you’d like to recommend? I’m no SEO or traffic expert so if I’ve missed any hacks that are appropriate for non-technical bloggers, please sound off in the comments. 



Charlie Patel

Charlie is always up to something. As a serial entrepreneur, he is CEO of Triberr - a content marketing suite and influencer marketing platform, Podcasts.com - a leading podcast host and directory, 99 Robots - a digital marketing & WordPress development agency, Ampfluence - an Instagram growth agency, and several other ambitious startups. He likes random emails from users, loves story-telling, but dislikes being in the spotlight.

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