Let’s face it. You put a lot of time, energy, and effort into creating content for your audience. As time goes on, it can be deflating and frustrating to see the shelf-life of your content become outdated. But that doesn’t always have to be the case. Finding ways to repurpose your outdated content is a great way to get the most out of your content marketing and be more agile in your marketing efforts.
Why Repurpose Your Outdated Content?
Here are a couple of specific reasons we love helping our clients find ways to repurpose content:
1. Repurposing content enables you to maximize the investment you’ve already made.
Rather than crafting every single piece of content from scratch, repurposing outdated content enables to you tweak what you’ve already created. This saves time, energy, and money. In most cases, you don’t have to do a complete overhaul, (although that’s also an option). Repurposing content enables you to take what’s already there and make sure it appeals to today’s audience.
2. Repurposing allows you to maximize your best content for new audiences.
Repurposing content can help you take your great, old content and give it a breath of fresh air (and some much-needed visibility). It’s also worth considering updating calls-to-action to articles that are still generating traffic to help you increase lead generation potential.
5 Ways to Repurpose Your Outdated Content
There are several approaches you can take to repurposing content. Here are a few tactics we’ve found to be most valuable.
1. Conduct an SEO Audit to Determine Which Content to Update
The first step in repurposing outdated content is to identify which blogs or resources are the most beneficial to refresh. This is where a content audit can help. An SEO content audit is a process of assessing existing content on your website to determine how you can get more and better quality organic traffic to each blog post or resource.
2. Add New Ideas or Project Examples to Your Content
One simple way to make outdated content more relevant is by updating it with new insights or portfolio examples. More than likely, the majority of your content is evergreen. Why throw out the whole post when only 20% is outdated? Updating your content could be as simple as adding a few recent statistics or highlighting a new “tip or trick” based on the latest industry insights.
3. Turn Content into Infographics, Videos, or Podcasts
Transforming written blog posts into videos or podcasts is a great way to extend the shelf-life of your outdated content. These are also helpful ways to repurpose content for different audiences. Some people prefer visual infographics over text statistics. Others choose podcasts over ebooks. Reformatting your content for different mediums means appealing to more audiences and extending your reach.
4. Utilize Content in Email Series
If you’ve written a few blog posts on the same topic, consider repurposing them into a newsletter series or email course. An effective marketing E-newsletter can showcase your best blog posts and resources. You can send this on a monthly basis or create custom email journeys for different personas as they’re added to your email list.
5. Add Guest Posts or Third-Party Articles to Your Site
If you’ve already been guest blogging as part of your digital PR campaign, why not maximize that content by adding it to your site? All you need to do is to ask the owners of the sites if they’re comfortable with you republishing the content on your own blog. This also provides them with added exposure to the post if you include a link back to it saying where it was originally published.
When it comes to maximizing your content marketing effort, find ways to work smarter, not harder. These tips will help you develop a strategy to repurpose outdated content and reach more people. Any effort will be worth it as it gives you a chance to help others, build your audience and grow your business. For more help in optimizing your content efforts, reach out to us to schedule a strategy session.