Creating high-quality, lead generating blog content is a real investment of time and energy. With that in mind, it makes sense to squeeze every last drop of benefit from each of your blog posts. If you’re worried that your older posts are growing stale and irrelevant, don’t worry – giving them a new lease of life is a quick and simple process.
Today, I’m looking at 4 simple strategies for optimising your old blog content to generate new leads.
1) Republish
Over a period of months and years, very few topics remain static. As technology evolves, social trends shift and industries transform, your previously cutting-edge content can find itself hurtling rapidly towards irrelevance.
Statistics become outdated, best practices become obsolete, and your most insightful, popular posts find their traffic and lead generation dwindling to a disinterested trickle.
This process of gradual decay has been exacerbated by Google’s search algorithms. The addition of ‘content freshness’ into their ranking calculations now means that the search visibility of content declines over time. As a result, content on topics perceived to be in highly-changeable industries will see quicker ranking drop-offs than content in more static areas.
To overcome this problem, it makes sense to periodically update older content. Rewriting outdated information will keep it relevant for a current audience, and encourage repeated sharing and engagement; and republishing an updated version will notify Google of the post’s continued relevance.
- Amend outdated and inaccurate information.
- Write new paragraphs to highlight recent developments.
- Include references to topical events and examples.
- Add revised data and updated statistics.
- Link to the latest resources and third-party information.
2) Repurpose
As well as republishing our content through the same platform (our business blog), we can increase its reach by publishing it through new channels.
Chances are, your target audience uses a diverse range of channels to research products and inform their buying decision - from social media networks like LinkedIn, through to Q&A sites like Quora. Repurposing your content through several of these channels multiples the chances of getting your content in front of the right people, at the right time.
Best of all, you’re doing your audience a favour – by offering them the ability to choose how they want to engage with your business.
3) Retarget
The whole point of content creation is to generate leads. Typically, we achieve that by encouraging our visitors to a call-to-action (CTA) at the end of the blog post, offering a free resource in exchange for their contact details.
The more relevant that CTA is to the topic of the post, the higher the conversion rates of that page will be. Your offer will be congruent with the theme of the post, and even offer a solution to the pain points that attracted the reader to the post in the first place.
Unfortunately, when choosing a CTA for a new blog post, there’s an element of guesswork involved. We have to try and predict the types of visitors that will find our post, and the problems and keywords that drove them to it.
Crucially though, we can retarget our older blog posts using cold, hard data. We can determine the exact keywords our posts rank for, and use those keywords to choose a relevant offer and rewrite our call-to-action.
When HubSpot adopted this approach, they managed to increase the lead generation of every page they tried it on – and in some cases, even doubled or tripled conversion rates.
4) Repromote
Each of these strategies is designed to breathe a new lease of life into your old content, helping you to keep your blogging efforts as relevant and engaging as possible.
Rewriting parts of your post, adding in new data and statistics, and even republishing on a new platform will all provide prospective readers with a new reason to read and share your post.
With that in mind, you need to promote repurposed content as rigorously as new content. Content promotion is sorely overlooked by many businesses, and hitting ‘Update’ on a post needs to be treated the same way as hitting ‘Publish’ for the first time.
- Schedule your updated content to be regularly shared through social media.
- Discuss your content through industry groups and forums.
- Email your mailing list with a link to your new post, and explain the changes you’ve made (and how they’ll benefit from them).
The Costs of Optimising Old Content
As with any marketing activity, optimising your old content has a cost occurred with it. The time and resources you dedicate to these four activities will incur an opportunity cost – and it’s possible that your money would be better spent writing new content.
Thankfully, there are two ways to make sure this strategy is quick and cost-effective:
Only Optimise Popular Posts
With limited time and resources, you need to focus your efforts on the posts that will realise the greatest improvement – typically posts that have high traffic, and relatively low conversion rates.
Work Out Your ROI
Monitor the time it takes you to optimise content, and the impact it has on traffic, conversion rates and lead generation. You can use these figures to work out your ROI, and compare it to spending the same amount of time on content creation.
