It’s difficult to come up with new topics for your company’s blog without revisiting topics that you’ve previously covered over the years. You may begin to feel like you’ve exhausted all of the interesting things to talk about, and you’ve hit a creativity wall that you can’t seem to climb over. But did you know that updating or recycling old blog posts is actually a top-notch marketing strategy that can help you get more customers to your website?
Here’s a secret from a marketing insider: marketers recycle and update old posts all the time. Why? Because it’s easy content marketing, and it puts your blog posts back into the spotlight for customers who may not have seen the post when it first published.
Here are a few tips for recycling your old content for a new audience.
Update Old Posts With New Info
The first step to recycling and reusing an older blog post is to find one that has info that might be outdated. When you first wrote the post, it probably had great info and was up-to-date with the latest trends in your industry. But as with most things these days, as the years go on the information in the blog becomes outdated. You don’t want to leave your outdated blog post on your website with irrelevant information. If someone happens upon your old blog post through a search engine or just by browsing your website, they’ll perceive your company as out-of-touch with the modern world.
Take these old blog posts, and update them with relevant, current information. You can even place a disclaimer at the top or bottom of the post indicating that the post has been updated. Newspapers and online publications do this all the time when they learn new info that they didn’t have at the time of the publication of the article. You can implement this tactic as well to update your old blog posts.
Bring Back An Old Post That’s Still Relevant
On the other side of the spectrum, you might have an old post that’s still relevant to your customers. In this case, instead of updating your blog post, you can just recycle the post.
Some topics are ageless and are still as relevant to consumers today as they were when you first published the post. For example, although floral trends change over time, the popularity of beautiful arrangements never changes. If you’re a florist looking to capture the eyes of future customers, and you have a blog post from a few years ago that shows off some of your amazing arrangements, you can take advantage of the relevancy of the post and recycle it. You might want to update the headline, but the content can stay relatively untouched if it’s still relevant.
You can even look to other sites to recycle your old content. Medium is a great place to republish older blog posts or even relatively new ones. Medium also has tools in place on the website to prevent posts from being marked as duplicate content, as this post on Medium’s website explains.
Repost Your Recycled Blog On Social Media
After you’ve recycled or updated your old blog posts, the next step is to get that content in front of the eyes of your customers. Just like any new blog post or piece of content published on your website, your updated posts need to be shared on your various social media accounts.
Your posts won’t reach your customers naturally if they’re an old post, mainly because they will still show the original publishing date, and might get lost in your blog archives. This is especially true if you have a blog platform, such as WordPress, that only shows your latest blog posts on the front page of your website.
Repost the updated blog posts on Facebook, Twitter, and others to ensure that the posts are seen by your customers online.
Recycling and updating old blog posts isn’t a lazy way to create content; it’s actually a proven strategy for boosting traffic to your website and reigning in new customers. Try reworking some of your older posts and see what kind of new traffic you can bring to your website!
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