Know how that goes…
Don’t you just love it when you give it all in every post just to see it buried in the archives a couple of weeks later?
Rhetorical question, I know…
It’s time to do something about it.
You CAN find other ways to give life to your retired content and here’s but a short list of what you can do.
1. Write an ebook
This is one of the best ways to use your old content.
The key here is to find a bunch of posts that are connected by a common topic and pull them together in a resource post or a free ebook.
Here are two examples of bloggers packaging their free content into ebooks.
In the first one, the blogger provides a free text version of his book as well as a premium paid version, which also includes an audio.
http://nathanhangen.com/blog/brilliance/
The following example is from Zen Habits, where the book created out of the existing content is selling for under $10:
http://zenhabits.net/new-e-book-the-zen-habits-handbook-for-life/
2. Rewrite old posts for guest posts
I know, I know – many bloggers require your guest posts to be “unique, original, and not previously published anywhere else”.
It absolutely doesn’t mean that you can’t use your old posts, especially the ones that were a hit with your readers as a BASIS for a guest article.
Rewrite, paraphrase, add some fresh facts and examples and you are all set to go.
Of course, you can use the same strategy for article marketing.
3. Turn old posts into Youtube videos
REPURPOSE.
That’s a great way to give your old posts a new life.
And believe it or not, it’s a cinch to do.
I explain more on how to turn your posts into video slideshows quickly and painlessly in this post:
4. Make old posts into an audio file or podcast
This one is similar to the previous way of recycling your content.
Once you turn your posts into videos, there’s an easy way to turn your voice-over for those videos into an audio file, which can easily be made into a podcast.
All you do is go to http://ListenToYouTube.com, enter your video URL, and press Go.
This free service will quickly strip your video voice-over and turn it into an MP3 ready to be distributed to various podcast sites.
5. Establish a post exchange with other bloggers
We, bloggers, are always looking for great fresh content to serve to our readers – after all, that’s what blogging is all about, right?
However, it’s amazing how hard it is to come by a good guest post; there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of those on my blog.
What you can do though is put together a group of other bloggers with great content and do an old post exchange every once in a while. It’s a great way for all of you to gain new readership, do some link building, and keep your content fresh with minimal effort.
But what about duplicate content penalty, Ana?
No such thing. At least not in a sense you are thinking about it.
If you have any concerns that Google will penalize you for reprinting someone else’s content, read this post:
6. Use old posts as the basis for broadcast emails
The purpose of any email list is not to boast about the sheer numbers of it, but to develop relationships with the subscribers on that list.
Staying in touch though is not always easy.
How often do you email your list? What do you say? – all valid questions that need to be addressed.
I, for instance, try to stay in touch with my list once or twice per week and always to offer up some special tips that only my list gets from me.
My old content serves me as great inspiration for that.
Once in a couple of weeks, I peruse through older posts, looking for inspiration for list emails.
Doesn’t mean that I simply email my old posts to my list – what’s the fun in that, right? Rather, I look for some tips that I can give a fresh spin and turn them into something valuable and current.
Inspiration is always the key here, and my archive content provides plenty of that.
7. Turn your old content into new posts
A few weeks back we talked about how to do a little spring cleaning on your blog and why Google says it’s important to do so.
That post ties in nicely with the concept of recycling your old content.
Let’s talk in a bit more detail about how we can use it to our advantage.
Let’s say you wrote a post about SEO plugins that was a hit back in the day, got a bunch of natural backlinks, ranks highly in Google, and still brings good amounts of traffic.
Problem is that content is outdated by now and could definitely use a makeover.
You have two choices here:
1. Simply update the existing post. However, your current readers will never know you did that and won’t get the benefit of the new information unless you mention it in a new post or possibly send an email to your list.
2. “Relocate” your old content to a new page, update it, and publish it anew. This way you create new, current content based on your old one.
Of course, you should always remember to do a 301 redirect of your old URL to the new one; that way you’ll make sure your search engine traffic can find the post they are looking for.
When your guest bloggers outrank you
This tactic also works for guest posts that were published on your blog and are now ranking highly in search engines.
It’s always great to see one of your posts show up in SERPs; however, if it’s a guest post that is ranking, you can potentially send all the search engine traffic to the guest blogger’s blog – good for them, not so much for you.
So what to do?
The best option is to write your own post on the topic…
Let me go back one step though.
First, you need to change the URL for the guest post in question to something different; even adding “part-1″ to the end of it will do.
Then you publish your own post under the old URL as a new post.
What happens now is that the search engine traffic will come to the new post, since it’s published under the ranking URL, and the guest blogger still retains all the links back to their blog, since their post is essentially left intact – after all, link building IS the long-term goal for guest posting, right?
So everyone wins in my book.
This tactic is my take on the living URL, explained in detail in this post on Search Engine Land and expanded upon in this post on Michael Gray’s blog.
Marketing Takeaway
There’s absolutely no reason you should loose your quality content to the abyss of your archives.
I quite often use one of the tips above to revive some of the older quality content on my blog; how about you?
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