Are you ever stuck about what to blog about? It happens. Instead of searching high and low for a topic, have you ever looked under your nose? Many of you out there have been blogging for while, and even if you started in the last year, you’ve got a ton of content right in front of you.
In the early days of your blogging, you probably had some great, fresh content that nobody saw! It’s time to brush the dust off of some of those posts and get them back into the stream.
Here are a few tips to make those older posts shiny and new again.
Let’s begin with titles. Maybe you came up with a timely and catchy title that made sense at the time, but now it gets lost. Content that you’ve posted in the past helps build the organic value for your blog and over time each post gets indexed in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages.) That’s a good thing, however, now that you’re a blogging pro, you realize that Headline/Title SEO is important too, (you can find a post on that here). Now you have an opportunity to create an SEO rich title for the same article you posted a while back.
Next, look at the actual content of your older blog. Has something changed? A quick update can fix that. Is it good-to-go as is? Then let it rip.
Are you concerned about re-purposing old content? Don’t be, it’s okay, and here’s why:
- When you first posted the content, you may have been getting less than ten views a day! Now your blog has exploded to hundreds of views a day. Think of all the people who missed your early efforts.
- If updates are required, your followers will see you as a true professional by keeping them up-to-date on previous posts.
- It’s worth throwing your greatest hits back out there.
If you are still feeling guilty about using an older post, you can always put a disclaimer at the end that says something like, “A version of this article was published previously in August 2012” and you can even link to it if you wish. The more people click through to your previous posts, the more organic value you produce.
Now you have permission to dig through your older posts. Dust them off and get them back out there for the world to see.
Note to self: quit writing topical posts, so I can recycle the older ones. 😉 Thanks for the hints, Jim!
I do Catch Up Mondays and recycle an older post for my new viewers. I always add something new at the beginning for both my new viewers and for those who have seen this already. It may be an update or just another take on why I wrote the post in the first place.
That’s a great way to do it Kathryn. Your blog is full of information so it’s good that you can keep it front and centre.
Posts I wrote over a three-year period were rewritten and then published as the book I Write: Being and Writing. This concept of refining and grouping was suggested by a friend, and I thanked him with an acknowledgement and a copy of the book. Your idea to use a blog to mine for ideas is very workable.
http://www.tomkeplerswritingblog.com/p/i-write-being-writing.html
Great idea, Jim. Maybe I’ll start recycling reviews. 🙂
You know BigAl, this is really not a bad idea. I am thinking of books like Melinda Clayton’s Cedar Hollow series, since she has recently changed publishers the book links on her reviews are no longer valid links. 😀
I know, wazi. I was being serious. I’m not always a smart … uh, you know. 🙂
I’m just a few posts off 365 so I’ll keep going as I am for now. 366 will be a whole new ballgame though. 🙂
Great reminder, Jim, thank you. Hmm…ways to repurpose six years of content…
I’ve re-purposed nearly every post that received only a handful of views when I first started my blog. I think it’s a great idea 🙂