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Many businesses feel pressured to produce a constant flow of social media content and website material to engage users and improve search engine rankings. Older blog posts may be a rich content source if you refresh and repurpose them. In fact, top marketing experts, like Neil Patel and Brian Dean, use repurposing tactics to save time, drive more website traffic and provide value to visitors.
We’ll explore 10 tactics for recycling blog content and explain the benefits of refreshing and repurposing.
Recycling blogs helps you reach audiences that missed your content the first time around and gives you a chance to improve your content’s depth and accuracy.
Here are 10 excellent ways to recycle older blog posts.
You may have a popular blog post that garners questions and comments while prompting discussion and engagement. Examine your feedback and consider if your readers would appreciate additional information not covered in the post.
If you receive enough questions that need answering or you want to correct misconceptions and add updates, consider splitting the blog post into two or more parts. Keep accurate, current information, and add more insights, explanations, examples and FAQs. You’ll provide the depth of details your website visitors genuinely want.
This approach is an excellent SEO tactic and also can be a way to generate qualified leads. When you share information and insights your visitors want, they may consider buying from you because of your expertise and communication skills.
Creating a two-part post to expand on a topic of interest is also an excellent tactic if you’re video blogging (vlogging).
“Evergreen” content stays fresh because it’s not time-sensitive. Examples include original research, case studies and how-to guides.
If you have older blog posts with valuable evergreen content, create a “featured content” page in your website design linking to all of your best evergreen posts. Include links to only the most helpful, informative and appreciated material. You can generate even more traffic if you add a page dedicated to links to your most popular blog posts.
Many businesses use tools and plug-ins such as Revive Old Posts to promote older content on social media. When installing one of these tools, you can decide which posts you want to share on social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. You can also harness the power of hashtags to generate more engagement with older evergreen content.
Another option is to compile links to evergreen content on your social platforms. For example, Bloggingtips.com created a Pinterest board with links to posts about popular blogging tips.
Source: Pinterest
To boost your social media presence, post often, keep your voice consistent and engage your audience by replying to comments.
Drive website traffic by promoting your most popular content in a weekly, monthly or bimonthly email newsletter. Newsletter recipients are more engaged than Facebook and Twitter users because they’ve likely subscribed to your material and aren’t just scrolling by it in their newsfeed.
Use email analytics software to gauge which customers and prospects are opening and engaging with your newsletter.
Roundup or “highlight” posts feature content that has connected the most with visitors over the past month or specified period. Roundup posts help visitors quickly access the content they’re most interested in at a glance without scrolling through your site.
To see an example, check out how A Beautiful Mess’ excellent roundup of fresh-squeezed cocktails links to popular older posts.
Update your content and win new traffic by reaching out to people in new places, like discussion forums. Find forums with a similar target audience, and share your insights and knowledge with other posters. You can include entire blog posts or relevant snippets to answer questions. On most discussion forum sites, you can even add a link back to your website in your signature.
For B2B marketing, ask trade magazines to publish your repurposed post. You can also network on LinkedIn by joining relevant groups and promoting links to your blog content.
Website visitors and blog readers respond to visual content. If older blog posts contain statistics and insights, use the information to create infographics or SlideShare presentations.
Use a free tool such as Canva or Piktochart to create your infographic or presentation so you don’t have to pay for a graphic designer. Infographics and presentations can generate significant traffic to your website.
Posting content on Medium.com is free. Ensure you upload your content to a site area specific to your repurposed blog’s subject matter. Medium.com is a massive platform, and chances are good that new audiences will come into contact with your brand.
Quora.com is a Q&A site. Users ask questions, and people respond to them. Like Medium, it gets very high visitor numbers and can deliver you to brand-new audiences. To save time, look for questions you can answer with high-quality repurposed blog content instead of writing answers from scratch.
Unfortunately, the links back to your website from Medium and Quora are “no follow” links, meaning you won’t get SEO benefits. However, repurposing your blog content on these sites is worth it because new audiences will see you on platforms they like and trust.
Opt-in email marketing is a successful way to gather customers’ contact details; they’ll give you their email addresses in exchange for a lead magnet – something of value they’ll receive for free.
Repurpose your existing blog content to create free e-books, whitepapers, user guides and product description sheets. Require visitors to give you their email addresses before they can download the content. You’ll be able to build an email list and send them even more content.
Include your domain name, brand name and URL on your downloadable repurposed blog content. Your prospects should know how to reach you for more information.
If you’ve created guest posts for other people’s blogs, update those posts and put them on your blog. Ensure you change the content enough to justify reposting it. Add some new information, change the wording, update statistics and answer questions. Before you post it, use a tool such as Copyscape to ensure the post passes a plagiarism test.
Refreshing blog content means adding updates and enhancements. Information, no matter how valuable, gets old. Google’s Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) algorithm ranks the latest high-quality content higher. Refresh what you share with visitors so it reflects current information.
Here are some ways to refresh your blog content:
When you’re optimizing your links, keep the following tips in mind:
You’ve already invested time and money in content for your site. Improve your marketing ROI by keeping content up to date and giving Google a reason to rank you.
When you repurpose blog content, you’re not just optimizing links; you’re turning your blog content into something new and different. Many of the tactics we described above, such as writing two-part blog posts and creating roundup posts, are ways to repurpose your blog content.
Repurposing blog content offers the following benefits:
The most successful businesses always “sweat their assets” – that is, look for ways to squeeze value and advantage out of their investments. This might mean operating two shifts in a factory to manufacture more products from expensive machinery.
Think of your blogs as assets that can be sweated. Refresh them to keep Google and your visitors happy. Repurpose them to help you find a wider audience. And, best of all, keep in mind that refreshing and repurposing your content saves time and money.