Good blogging doesn’t need to rely solely on a constant stream of new content; optimizing your old material can offer big benefits to your blog with little extra effort on your part.
In part 1 of our series on effective business blogging, we discussed how and why you should utilize cornerstone content. In part 2, we talked about the value of high impact blogs and how you can create excellent content. Here, we’ll explain how your past blogs can maximize the value of your current blogging strategy.
There’s no doubt that the burden of content creation can wear on even the most seasoned of bloggers. With the millions of blogs that exist out there, it can be tough to keep up.
But there’s no need to fret — if you’ve been blogging smartly and diligently, you already have a wealth of valuable content at your fingertips.
The marketing masters at HubSpot highlighted the value of old content by analyzing their conversion rates and lead generation. They found that 76 percent of their monthly views and 92 percent of blog leads came from their older content.
Now, since your older posts are already generating reader interest, imagine the value of repurposing high performing posts for the present.
Why Repurpose?
New content creation may be the backbone of blogging, but a 2014 report by Forrester indicates that nearly 50 percent of created content goes unused. This means that enterprise growth can’t come from just creating more and more.
Reviving your old content offers plenty of advantages over creating new material, such as:
- Increased outreach as viewers are exposed to content that they may have missed the first time around.
- Better SEO and link building as you update your content for optimized inbound marketing tactics.
- An updated message as you refresh old content with new initiatives and goals that you may have developed since their original publication.
How Do I Optimize My Old Content?
Any effort to upgrade your old content should begin with data analytics. You should know which posts generate the most traffic, which have been most effective at generating leads, and which have the most conversion potential.
From there, you can strengthen the weaker aspects of each post to reflect your needs for stronger overall content:
- Posts with high conversion rates but low traffic can be enhanced with SEO and long-tail keywords to increase their ranking and get more views.
- Posts suffering from low conversion rates can be adjusted with updated content that’s more relevant to your viewers or with links to newer material that can nurture your leads.
But optimizing your old content doesn’t stop there. Let’s examine a few other ways to add a brand new shine to your dusty material.
The 3 R’s of Content Optimization
Repackage
You likely have plenty of posts that are jammed with statistics and data as relevant to your users now as on first publishing date.
An easy way to put a new spin on those old posts is to create new delivery methods such as images, infographics, or newsletters that can present your existing data in a fresh way. This is particularly true for social media sharing. Research by Simply Measured indicated that the induction of Facebook’s timeline spurred a 65 percent increase in visual content engagement on their site.
Photos and video drive engagement as shown by Simply Measured
Refresh
Sometimes, certain aspects of your blogs can become obsolete while other points remain relevant as ever. This outdated information can drag the entire post down, making content pruning a simple way of bringing old content to life. Chop away the irrelevant information, add a few new details to give it a different spin, and slap a new headline on it. Instant value.
Repost
The great thing about platforms like Facebook and Twitter is that they’re in constant motion. New viewers are constantly joining, news feeds are always updating, and content is being shared more than ever before — at 1 million links every 20 minutes, according to research by Statistic Brain.
Take advantage of this by sharing your old content to bring new eyes to your material. Even if you don’t make many changes, there’s a good chance something you share will reach a bigger audience now than when you originally posted it.
Conclusion
Considering how quickly content is created, trying to keep up a constant flow of new material can be overwhelming.
Bloggers interested in adding value to their old material can repackage old content, refresh outdated blogs, and repost content to new audiences. These changes need to be informed with data and should reflect the needs of your market, but the benefits to your blog’s outreach, web traffic, and lead generation can make the outcome more than worth the effort.
What other ways have you reused your old blogs to create new value for your readers? Tell us about it in the comments below!
