A Hidden Key to Marketing

Maintaining a relevant and engaging blog is a non-stop process. One of the keys to having a great blog is to continually be sharing new content. There is, however, a secret key waiting to be utilized for your blogging good – your old blog articles. Don’t let them sit around and gather digital dust; rather, use them as valuable assets that can be revitalized and repurposed for ongoing success. In this article, we’ll explore various strategies to breathe new life into your aging blog posts.

Update Past Blogs Add More Content

Start by reviewing your previous blog articles and assessing their relevance. Industries evolve, trends change, and information can become outdated. A key step in optimizing your blog articles and website content is to update it with the latest information, statistics, and insights available. This not only ensures the accuracy of the articles, but also demonstrates your commitment to staying current in your field. When you go back to previous articles and update them, you are also showing search engines that the blog article (and the ranking you achieved with it) are important to you and you don’t want to lose it.

If you write an amazing blog article and it ranks for a given keyword, there is likely another business out there that is looking to write a blog article to rank for the same keyword. So by going back to your past articles and updating content and writing even more great content for them, can prove to the search engines that you are the leading authority on the topic. You might update things like mentions of “The best thing to do in 2023…” and have the update to the most current year. You can review research or studies that might be referenced in your blog article and find newer or better research to support your blog. You can also add in even more content to the blog itself.

Your initial blog post may have covered the basics of the topic. But now, you likely have grown your knowledge and expertise in that topic and can speak to it even more. You will also likely come across blog articles of your competitors, and see areas that they went into great depth with on the topic. Don’t copy and paste or plagiarize what they wrote, but learn the new ideas and write more content to get added into your original blog. Expand on your original content by adding new sections, case studies, or examples. The goal is to transform a once-static post into a comprehensive and evergreen resource.

Repurpose for Other Marketing

Remember the old Ron Popeil line, “Set it, and forget it!” That line DOES NOT describe your blog at all! In fact, it’s the complete opposite that is true for your blog articles. Once they are written and published, you can reuse them for many other uses. One of my favorites is to repurpose them into other marketing.

Email newsletters, when sent out regularly, are a great way to always stay front of mind with your clients and customers. The problem can be that coming up with new content each week for a newsletter can be quite time consuming.

This is where your old blog articles become so handy. Old blog posts can be repurposed as great content for your email newsletters. While the blog article as a whole is likely much too long for an ideal newsletter, you can condense it down to a basic summary and include a link to the full article. This not only gets some extra miles out of the blog, but also pulls users back to your site and provides a boost in traffic. A win win!

You can also take your blog articles of the past and pull out key points and turn them into great social media posts. Again provide a link to the full article and you can get that boost in traffic that all websites crave. You can also use your old blog articles when you’re replying to questions or comments that your followers post on your social media channels. Doing this can help share your knowledge of the industry and show the care you have for your followers. A win win again!

Reread for New Blog Topics

When you go back and review your past blog posts, you might see one particular line or sub-topic that sort of jumps out at your. Maybe back then you didn’t have a lot to say about that subtopic or maybe it didn’t fit for a blog article of its own, but that has all possibly changed.

For example, I was going back to an older blog article recently to update a few points and I had the idea for this article you’re reading now. We have many articles talking about responsive web design and why it’s important, but we never wrote about the need for responsive logo design. Now we have more content to write about.

When you have the new articles written and published, you can add links and references to the old article and drive traffic to that past article again. You can then use the new article in an email newsletter and social media and drive even more traffic to both articles. A win win win win!

SEO Enhancement with Internal Linking

Going back to previous articles provides the opportunity to make improvements on many SEO points as well. There are likely new landing pages you’ve published that you can link to on those older articles. This is especially powerful if you have a successful blog article that is ranking well in search engines. By adding those links to new landing pages, you have a greater chance of getting search engines to rank that page as well.

As your business grows and evolves, your keyword strategy can update a little as well. For example, on the Full Scope Creative blog, we had articles referencing ourselves as being “web developers.” After a while we realized that no one really searched for that in Google much. Rather, they were searching for “web designers.” We updated most of the references throughout our site, pages and blog articles, to reflect the new search term. Going back to older blog articles and reviewing to make sure they are dialed in to your biggest keywords can help ensure the ranking your business is looking for.

A rather valuable resources

Your old blog articles are not relics of days gone by. . They are actually a rather valuable resource waiting to be utilized. By updating, expanding, and repurposing them, you can extend the miles and life of your blog articles. Approach your archives with a fresh perspective, and you’ll find a wealth of opportunities to captivate your audience and boost your website’s performance.

The key to success is not only to be creating new content but also in maximizing the potential of what you already have.