Cambridge New Media Services

Make Money from Old Blog Posts

With the release of V2 of our Free old posts plugin I thought it was time to introduce some of its features and how it could improve your revenue. It might not be a $10k plugin for the majority of people but we could all do with a little extra around Christmas time.

Remove posts from old dates

So the basic premise of the plugin is simple, it will search through locate posts older then value you set and then remove any time based date from the post template. It will do the same with comments, it can only cope with dates generated by Wordpress but its enough to make any post or page appear timeless. But why bother?

Surfers and in particular social media users tend to think in a very temporal way if they consider a post old then it must have less importance then newer posts consequently older posts tend to have higher bounce rates then newer content on a site. Of course old content could well be out of date but for this article that is entirely irrelevant!

Getting Started

Ok if you haven’t already go download Old Posts Plugin, you will be asked for an email address so we can let you know about um updates! (Don’t worry we have a privacy policy, apparently we won’t sell or otherwise distribute your email address)

Once downloaded, unpack and upload the file to your plugins folder, log in to your admin area, activate as normal, you can find the Settings Page in Settings -> Old Posts by default both posts and comments dates will be hidden after 90 days. Depending on how often you post, content etc you might want to change that to a longer or shorter period.

That’s it, go visit a post older then the number of days you specified and as if by magic the date info has gone! Unfortunately on most templates it has left a rather ugly hole!

Thankfully with a couple of template modifications we can make it go away.

Modifying templates

Themes sometimes have their own unique way of doing things, you may need to experiment a little to get this right

Old Posts comes with a handy helper function which you can use in your themes and plugins, the is_post_old() function returns true false, if true the post is older then the number of days you set in the admin area, if false its either younger or not actually a post, the other option is is_post_old(#) where # is a post ID this will return if the post related to the ID is old or not.

Basic Example – Remove dates
In your current theme folder open single.php and find the section relating to dates in the default theme it looks like:

This entry was posted
on <?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?> at <?php the_time() ?>
and is filed under <?php the_category(', ') ?>.

Now lets wrap the date part with is_old_post()

<?php if(!is_old_post()){ ?>
This entry was posted
on <?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?> at <?php the_time() ?>
and is filed under <?php the_category(', ') ?>.
<?php } ?>

The result:

Old posts = More ads!

So we have removed the dates but what else could we do? Well the obvious thing is to add some additional advertising while this will not adversely effect your existing subscribers it may put off new visitors if they arrive at your site via an old post so use carefully!

The additional adverts can be called simply by adding to a sidebar or where ever you want the advert to appear

<?php if(!is_old_post()){ 
ADVERT CODE HERE
} ?>

If your adding to a sidebar, you may want to check if the page is a post/page before making the old post check to save on DB calls you can do this by using

if(is_single() || is_page()) {

}

Changing your PermaLinks to not reflect dates

For all these cosmetic changes its worth remembering that the default permalink structure for Wordpress is date based, a user is going to notice the date pretty quickly so it might be worth modifying your urls so they don’t contain the date. A quick way to do this is with the Permalink Migration plugin.