If you’ve been blogging a lot of content over the years, some of it might need some updating, and some might need some attention. Bloggers often forget that if they don’t keep mentioning their older posts, especially evergreen content, then it pretty much is playing a ‘luck of the draw’ game in hopes that people are searching for that specific topic.

Why You Should Refresh Your Old Blog Content

Refreshing your old content is important. Just leaving content to stay stagnant lets your visitors know that those articles aren’t really important to read anymore. You don’t want to convey that message. In fact, you want them to see those older articles, especially if they still contain relevant information.

Also, refreshing your old content allows you to take the time to comb over and improve those articles. This allows good content to become excellent content.
[tweet “When you refresh old content – good content can become excellent content”]

For search engine optimization, refreshing your content brings the search engines attention back too! As soon as you hit update, your site will ping search engines that you have fresh content to gobble up and organize. It could even help place your article in a more favorable position.

For marketing, you can utilize the opportunity of refreshing old blog content by putting together a strategy tied with your business. You can choose to produce a whole bunch of articles related to that old article. You can try holding a social activity in trying to promote that piece. In some niche, you can even develop an entire product to sell based on that old post!

In social media, refreshing your content allows your blog posts to be seen over again, thus converting people that may not have seen the post the first time it was shared.

How to Make Your Blog Content Fresh Again

Showcase random articles on your front page or categories page.

If you’re using a content management system like WordPress, most themes come naturally built with displaying your most recent posts. Some premium themes, or if you have a custom built theme, may come with a special template for your front page. You can utilize this front page template to display certain posts alongside some of your most recent posts.

In the case you don’t have a special front page template, you can utilize a widget to showcase older posts. You can do this by simply listing the title of the article and linking to it.

There are plugins available to display the most recent posts, or popular posts, but none for older posts. This is something that you will have to do manually.

If your theme comes with a custom category template, or you are using a plugin like Widget Logic to display content on a specific category, post, or page.

Pick old posts to randomly post on social networks.

While you can feature posts within your site, you still need to think about social network sites. Every little bit helps. The more your content is seen on a social network stream, the more likely you will bring visitors to your website.

Even though you shared an article months or years ago, you can still re-share it. If the blog post still has fresh content, share it without hesitance.

Re-purpose your content into other mediums.

If you’ve been publishing your blog content in a specific media, like a video, image, blog post, or podcast, then you may want to try re-purposing that post in as many media as you can. This gives your article a higher chance of being seen.

Some people learn better from videos, some prefer to learn from podcasting, and others may like to read, so this gives your site that extra oomph on being more web accessible.

Update old articles and re-publish.

Evergreen content is known as content that has information that always seems fresh. However, even evergreen content gets a little stale from time to time. It could be that the niche has updated information that you should be covering.
[tweet “New & Improved isn’t just for detergent…Review & refresh content regularly”]

If you take a look at your older content, aside from updating the blog post, making sure that your site is providing the best information is what will make your article not just fresh, but probably one of the best in your niche. This would probably be the best time to take advantage of doing some re-purposing.

If you enjoyed this article, Rebekah Radice also wrote on how to revive your old blog content.

Have you been paying attention to some of your older posts? How often do you re-publish a post? Have you ever re-purposed a post?