How to Make Your Blog Content Fresh Again

refresholdblogcontent-thumbnailIf 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?

Need Help Writing "How To" Posts?

The Conversionator V3 N25: Weekly Insights and Ideas

Weekly Roundup of Conversion Ideas

Max The Conversionator

This week’s edition includes an outline on how to write how-to posts, tips for integrating social media activities, suggestions for using Amazon to further content marketing goals, a mindmapping tool review, and points out things you should be doing with Google Analytics:

Is Your Small Business Taking Advantage of SlideShare?

The Conversionator V3 N22:Insights and Ideas for Small Businesses

SuperMax ConversionatorThis week’s edition covers why you should use SlideShare to your advantage, tips on improving direct response landing pages, some essentials for using data in your content, an infographic highlighting social media‘s effect on search, and techniques for improving your conversion rate:

Social Media Tips for Small Businesses

Social Media for Small BusinessesAs a small business owner, your time is valuable. You have a lot of responsibilities clamoring for your attention, and you need to make sure you use each moment wisely. When it comes to social media, you can spend an awful lot of time delving into all the different tools, but making sure your efforts count can be a bit trickier. Here’s how to make the most of your small business social media investment without spending countless hours on work that won’t bring results.

Keep the Conversation Going with Social Media

Marketing with social media isn’t like marketing with print or radio or television.

It isn’t like advertising on a billboard or in a community events calendar. It’s not even like holding a press conference.

Why? All of these advertising efforts involve one-way communication, with you broadcasting to the consumer. Social media marketing changes the game by creating a two-way marketing conversation.

To be successful with social media marketing, you must recognize the shift in marketing strategy necessitated by a two-way conversation.

Marketing with social media is no longer about shouting out messages and crafting invincible brand images. Instead, it’s about interaction. Here’s how to get started.

Are You Engaging Your Customers with Social Media?

Using Social Media to Engage with your CustomersEach year the percentage of companies using social media as a means of engaging with customers increases.

If you don’t have a Facebook and Twitter account for your business, it’s time to jump on the bandwagon or be left in the dust.

More important than simply opening social media accounts, however, is understanding how customer engagement with social media has permanently altered the way businesses interact with customers.

How Social Media Changed Customer’s Attitudes Towards Business

Unlike phone and email services which were used widely by businesses before finding their way into individual homes, social media got its start at the grass roots level and embedded itself firmly in the habits and expectations of consumers long before big business realized how it could benefit from social media marketing.

For this reason, customers, not businesses, were the ones to define the rules and shape the understanding of how social media could and should be used. Customer engagement with social media is on the terms of the individual, not on the terms of large companies, meaning that you have to play by the rules if you want to succeed.

The rules include listening to customer opinions, taking them seriously, and responding quickly and meaningfully to feedback. As more and more of your customers expect to be treated this way, they’ll be less and less tolerant of failures on the part of businesses to live up to customer service expectations.

How Business Operations Must Change

Because customers can freely and immediately share information about products and services, businesses can no longer hide problem areas. Instead, they must be ready to immediately address customer concerns.

Failure to do so will result in overnight disaster. (Just ask Domino’s.) As you increase customer engagement with social media, recognize that you must commit to long-term involvement with customers as well as to company transparency in order to win loyalty and build consumer trust.

How Businesses Can Benefit from Social Media

It might be a little frightening to think about all your customers knowing instantly about company warts and defects. But instead of panicking and trying to mask problems, try involving your customers in seeking a solution.

If customers know that you’re aware of the problem, that you’re seeking to fix it, and that you’re willing to listen to their concerns and suggestions, they’ll be much more forgiving of mishaps than they would be if you tried to hide errors.

Customer engagement with social media can be a daunting prospect to companies that are used to addressing problems internally before customers see them. But by using the benefits of social media to your best advantage, you’ll end up not only with a stronger business model, but also with more loyal customers.

How are you using social media to engage with your customers?