If you’re a frequent blogger, chances are some of your most valuable content has been buried within your archives for months — or years.
There are topics in every industry that will forever remain of interest to audiences. If you’ve already written about them, you shouldn’t be wary of revisiting them again. When attempting to do this, bloggers will often just copy and paste their old blog posts into new ones. However, this can cause problems with duplicate content and doesn’t offer readers anything new. Below are four quick and easy ways to revive old blog posts while still offering your audience value.
Identify Your Best-Performing Blog Posts
As a busy marketer, you don’t want to spend your precious time focusing on just any blog post — especially when some are better left in the archives. Before you get creative with revival tactics, it’s important to conduct a blog audit to determine which posts are worth bringing back to life.
Examine your website analytics to identify the blog posts that have generated notable spikes in traffic, as well as those that have continued to over-perform since their initial release. Once identified, you can delve deeper into why this content was so successful. While reading through each post, ask yourself:
- Is the title particularly attention-grabbing or provocative?
- Do I reference any specific events, research or brands?
- Is the writing style and tone of voice different than my other posts?
- Have I used any rich media?
- Where was the blog promoted and was it picked up by any influencers?
- Are there many comments or social shares?
- What feedback have readers given about the post?
These questions will help determine what made this specific post stand out from the rest. These attributes can be emulated in your future posts to help increase their popularity.
Refresh the Copy
When reviving blog posts, your main goal is likely to increase traffic. However, this doesn’t mean you should look at refreshing content from an SEO-only perspective.
Instead, you need to ensure that the content and information contained within your posts is updated and more engaging for your audience. This will make your refreshed posts far more attractive to Google than any SEO wizardry would. Read your blog post with fresh eyes and with the following questions in mind:
- Does the copy reflect my current messaging and branding?
- Is the copy aimed at my current target audience?
- Am I featuring my latest products and services?
- Do any time-sensitive events need to be removed or replaced?
- Are any statistics or research references now outdated?
The above are examples of areas within business that are constantly evolving. This means that any blog posts that were written years (or even months) ago are likely to become outdated quickly and will need to be updated to reflect your current brand. There are many opportunities to get creative and generate more content around a specific topic. Below are some strategies that you can utilize:
Follow-Up Posts
If you wrote a blog post titled “SEO for Beginners,” for example, you could follow it up with “SEO for Advanced Marketers.” Alternatively, you can approach the topic from a different angle while still covering similar content. Using our SEO example, you could produce a post on “5 SEO Mistakes Beginner Marketers Make.”
If you really want to delve into the topic, why not split the post up even further? Continuing with our SEO example, if you focused on keywords, content and links, you could produce a more in-depth post on each of these three areas.
Guides
If you have multiple posts on a similar topic, guides allow you to combine all of this information into a central piece of content that users can easily consume. Experiment with the design to make it as eye catching and enticing as possible. You could even include diagrams and actionable worksheets.
It’s likely that your audience is used to submitting basic demographic details in return for a guide download, so make sure you use this to your advantage to build your database and email list.
Checklists and Worksheets
If you’re more concerned with simplifying your blog post, a checklist or worksheet is a perfect way to turn information into a usable, more tangible format. And the reader is more likely to take action with your advice and improve their results. This increases the perceived value of your content, which of course reflects well on your brand.
Offer Something Visual
Increasing the visual nature of your content is an ideal way to breathe new life into old words. It’s also great for engaging with those who are visual learners. One of the hardest parts of producing visual content is coming up with the background information and script. Luckily, you’ve done a lot of the hard work with your blog post, so you can jump straight into the following ideas:
Videos
Video is traditionally linked to high budgets, but in recent years this hasn’t been the case. Many brands have great success filming videos on their phones and uploading them to video-sharing sites like Vine. You could either use the information within your blog post to create an informative video, or be a little more creative and explain the information using a visual story or short film.
Webinars
Webinars are a great way to share knowledge, engage viewers, and are often used for data capture purposes. So ask your audience to register to attend, and then capture their name and email address for future marketing communications.
Infographics
If you have the design resources available, infographics are ideal for reviving content — especially if your blog is based around statistics or short snippets of information. Make sure to keep copy to a minimum and focus on images and numbers instead. Image-heavy content is particularly popular on social networks, so infographics are likely to increase your social exposure, too.
By including the above tips in your strategy, you’ll be able to produce more of the content that your audience wants to see without dramatically adding to your workload. Additionally, you can ensure that all of the content you produce moving forward is created with revival and repurposing in mind, saving you even more time and resources in the long run.
This article was originally posted on the ClickX blog here.
Since founding Chicago marketing firm OneIMS, Solomon Thimothy has quickly risen to the rank of local leader in rebranding, web development and marketing campaign integration. What began as a marketing solution for local and small business owners quickly evolved as Thimothy’s reputation for expert strategies spread well beyond the Chicago area.
The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
