Content marketing is still one of the most frequently used traffic generation strategy in the present moment.
Why? Simply because it’s effective, consistent, and long-term. According to the LinkedIn Marketing Community, here are the top content marketing strategy preferences of today’s webmasters:
As you can see, blogging is the most frequently preferred content marketing tactic, and blogging revolves around content.
Content, content, content. How do we get that much content? And it’s not so much about the quantity of it, but how good that content is.
The most effective way you can create content is by improving on your best- performing existing content. Considering that your blog has plenty of published posts, you can easily ‘borrow’ the high performers and turn them into something even greater.
In today’s post, we’ll be giving you several simple solutions that’ll help you bring your content back to life – without further ado, let’s get straight to it.
1. Link to Your Older Posts
One of the simplest things you can do is to use your fresh content to drive eyeballs to your existing content. First off, skim through your old blog posts and see whether you can find a topic that can serve as an addition to the post you’re writing right now.
For example, if you’re writing “10 Ways to Promote Your Content on Social Media”, you can link an old post that explains the “10 Ways to Develop Great Content.”
When you include a link to an old post in a new article, make sure it’s relevant to the reader. One more thing: don’t forget to update the links from your old posts. Google doesn’t really appreciate dead or misleading links.
2. Reassess Your Targeted Keywords
Have you targeted the right keywords and key phrases? Some posts might have performed terribly, and this might be the culprit. Look back at your old content – reassess whether the keywords you have targeted are the best choices. In case you’re not really sure how to optimize your content with the right keywords, here’s a quick guide on how to do that.
You don’t have to change all your keywords. However, you do need to start testing. Using the right keywords can make a world of difference in terms of traffic.
3. Change Your Post’s Title and Meta Tags
Whenever you try to repurpose a piece of old content, don’t forget about rewriting your post’s titles and meta tags. A great way to come up with titles is by using CoSchedule’s headline analyzer.
Then, ensure that you don’t forget to update your meta title, URL link, and meta description. Google will give you a small boost as soon as you start developing new activity on every piece of content that you make available.
4. Change the Visual Elements of the Post
John Mark, the Chief Marketing Strategist at Rush My Essay, gives his perspective on the importance of your thumbnails:
“Many people end up on articles because the highly attracting thumbnail of a post tempts them to click. The stronger the visual elements of your posts the more impact they’ll have. Some people might even share your post because they loved the visual sights. Therefore, in order to drive more traffic to your old posts, you need to make your visual content really attractive and attention-grabbing.”
Start looking over the images in your posts again and see whether some of them require modifications or not. There is no shortage of visual marketing tools out there, so try them out when you decide to update your visuals.
5. Write a Resource List Article that Features Your Best Content
If you’re running out of ideas, you can simply craft a blog post that features your best-performing content. Throughout this piece – you should display the most valuable and relevant posts that your brand has ever published. Resource posts are always valuable assets people are always searching for different types of content that can help them.
As the articles in your list have already proved to be effective, it should perform better than your typical posts. You may even consider putting some paid budget to boost it whether it be on social media or Google Adwords.
6. Incorporate Old Content into Your Newsletter
Email marketing is still king. If you haven’t built a list yet, I highly encourage you to do so. For those of you who already have a base of email subscribers, introducing your old posts into the newsletter can be a great strategy. It’s a cost-free method of driving eyeballs back to your old content.
Do remember to link everything back to your website, where your fans can enjoy the content in its full shape.
7. Change the Posts’ Publication Dates
Another brilliant way of reanimating your old posts is to change the publication date of your posts. If you’re using WordPress, you can do that pretty easily. The main idea here is to let your readers know that you took the time to update your old content. Moreover, if you make a few changes here and there, Google’s also getting noticed that you’re ensuring your readers with the most up-to-date content around the niche.
8. Create an Archive Page
An archive page is a brilliant idea for every blog that features more content than the usual. You can feature your archive page in the main header, letting everyone know that your brand is based on valuable content that you’re eager to put in front of everyone.
Your archive page should also have its own marketing campaign. A great content marketing strategy would be to update your existing content and to create your new content with links towards the page. By doing so, every time someone consumes your content, they’ll be led to more relevant information.
9. Reintroduce Old Posts by Creating Videos around Their Subject
A blog post is always a valuable asset. When you have already approached a topic with your audience in the past, you can continue developing new content around the same subject, but in a different format such as a video. You can then distribute the video on various social media platforms including Instagram Stories and Facebook Live.
Throughout your video, you should point your viewers towards the old content. Moreover, you can also proceed the other way around. Considering that your brand has a few quality videos which have already gained traction, you can approach a similar topic and link back to your old videos (and vice-versa).
10. Monitor the keywords you’re targeting
Start noting down all the main keywords and key phrases that your old blog posts are featuring. Now, use a real-time monitoring tool to track these keywords. Whenever someone posts a new question or spells your keywords, you will be immediately notified.
This way, you can be the first who acts and shares a valuable answer that’ll be seen by more than just a person. Without being too intrusive, let it be known that your blog discusses the same type of topics and that it features very relevant information concerning different topics of discussion, belonging to the specific niche that you’re targeting.
11. Syndicate Your Content
Another great way to improve your old blog posts’ reach is to syndicate them. There are dozens of content syndication sites that allow you to make your content available to a big number of webmasters and bloggers who are eager to post it on their platforms.
Content syndication is an underrated marketing strategy, yet I believe it can be very effective if applied in the correct way. Here’s a post that’ll teach you how to syndicate your content without annoying Google.
Takeaways
Bringing your content back to life is a simple yet efficient way of improving your website’s traffic. We all spend a lot of time and effort creating content regularly – repurposing them strategically helps us get the most our of our work. The more quality content you put in front of your target audience, the more you can position yourself as an expert and help your business grow.
