How To Breathe New Life Into Old Content

The Internet is inundated with content. It seems like every thing you want to say has already been said hundreds of ways, thousands of times. Even the best ideas become redundant over time because it’s almost like nobody has an original thought on the Internet anymore. Everything is hashed and rehashed to the point that it’s no longer appealing.

According to research done by Internet Live Stats – more than 4 million blog posts are published each and every day. Conversely, research conducted by Boost The News found that new articles and blog posts published online receive 74% of their lifetime traffic on the first day they were posted. The second day, they receive just a paltry 25% of their traffic…meaning they are 99% done within two days of being published.

If that’s the case, you would have to churn out hundreds of articles and blog posts every day to maintain SERP and continue generating traffic, right?

Wrong!

You can breathe new life into your content and use it to your advantage.

You may be thinking, “Well, won’t I get penalized by Google for re-posting something I’ve already published?”

No!

Because there is a method to the madness of re-using your old content that we are going to share with you.

Check For A Pulse, No Matter How Faint

Do an audit of your website or blog to determine which content has performed well over time. That’s the stuff you want to keep. Anything that is irrelevant to your brand now needs to be deleted. It served its purpose, but all its doing now is distracting would-be readers with needless, irrelevant clutter. Get rid of the fluff. Don’t forget to use 301 redirects to send readers to relevant replacement pages. Otherwise, you may miss out on traffic.

Revise and Revive

Of the content that you do keep on your website or blog, read back through it to see how it can be made relevant again. You may have to research and update long tail keywords, cite statistics or revamp your talking points to include information that has been discovered since you first posted the piece. Omit what sounds dated or what no longer applies to your brand or market trends. Do a little research on related pieces and what’s hot – and then add to your existing content accordingly.

Redistribute

Once your old content has a new lease on life, help people find it by distributing it on your social media pages, your email lists, blogs, websites – anywhere you have a following and any place where it will be visible. Linking to the re-purposed content via intersital links will wreak havoc on your bounce rate. Driving traffic to the old stuff once its had a make over is best done through external, organic sources.

Reincarnate

Just because your original content was a blog post or 3,000 word article doesn’t mean it has to be in its next life. You can take that foundation and build something completely new from it – and generate organic external links to boot. For instance, you could turn your old content into an infographic, a blog post or even a podcast. It has a brand new life and appears fresh, but it doesn’t take any more effort from you than creating the actual media – because the groundwork has already been laid. Then, once the new content has been created from the old content, you can give the old content leverage by linking back to the original piece to give readers the full version, if you wish.

There’s no reason to feel inferior or that your brand is lacking in some way because you re-purpose your content. Truth be told, every successful website or blog – yep, even your competition – does the same thing on a daily basis – ad nauseum. They realize the potential value that old content can provide and seize the opportunity to use it to their advantage. Why shouldn’t your brand do the same thing?

The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham.