The 5 Rs of Breathing Life into Old Content Marketing

In the 60 seconds it took you to get up and refill your coffee before settling back at your desk to write a new blog post for your ecommerce business, Smart Insights estimates that 1440 WordPress posts were published. That really puts the world of content marketing into perspective, doesn’t it?

In order to compete in a content-saturated market, you need to be creating incredible blog posts, YouTube videos, and other content marketing pieces. But all that takes time — and as the owner of an e-commerce business, you have plenty of other things on your plate.

The good news is that you probably already have a back catalog of great content that you can tap into.

While publishing brand-new content is a great way to improve your Google search rankings and attract customers, don’t forget about your older content. Republishing, repurposing, and reusing your existing content marketing pieces can create a big impact while saving you time.

So don’t let these pieces out to pasture just yet. Here are the five R’s of breathing life into your old content marketing.

Learn more: 5 Reasons You Need an E-Commerce Content Marketing Strategy

Republish

Sure, you could just publish an article in one place and call it good. Or, you can make it work for a living like the rest of us.

If you write a great article for your newsletter, for example, give it a week or so and then post it on your blog. After another week or so, get your content in front of a wider audience by syndicating it on other websites like Medium, LinkedIn, or Quartz. (Check out this article from Content Marketing Institute for more information on how Google handles duplicate content versus syndicated content.)

That gives you three separate occasions for your audience to stumble on your content.

Repost

Because only a small slice of your social media followers see any given post, it’s likely that if you only post once or twice about a piece of content, the majority won’t notice.

Use a tool like Buffer, CoSchedule or HootSuite to recycle old content through your social media. These tools will also provide you with excellent analytics to help you figure out which pieces of content perform the best, when your audience is most likely to engage with the content, and other such goodies.

Learn more: 8 Interesting Content Marketing Trends [Infographic]

Redirect

After a customer reads your fantastic review of fall handbag trends, what should she read next? Keep customers engaged with your content by providing links to other content on your website. When I blog for clients, I always include at least two links to relevant older posts in each new post I write.

(Internal linking is also great SEO content strategy.)

(See what I did there?)

Another great way to keep customers engaged with your website’s content is to install a related posts plugin. That way, as soon as you hit publish, your related posts show up automatically.

Using related post plugins to boost content marketing
IvyCat’s related posts.

Refresh

Since you’re going to be directing customers more to your back catalog of content marketing pieces, it pays to give some of them a freshening up. Use Google Analytics to find your top performing posts, then give them a quick scan to make sure they’re still relevant.

(I have a simple rubric I use to help clients assess their content. You can get it for free here.)

Refresh your oldie-but-goodie posts by:

  • Updating examples and stats
  • Mentioning new influencers or products
  • Updating your calls to action
  • Collecting them all in a “Best of” round-up

Repurpose

Just because a piece of content started its life as one thing doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. Repurposing old content into new forms is a great way to create a new offering for your audience without having to build it from scratch.

Do you have a series of great blog posts on a certain topic? Turn them into an ebook.

How about a long, in-depth blog post? Turn it into a series of short punchy posts with great visuals.

An interesting survey? Turn it into an infographic, or explain it in a YouTube video!

How will you boost your old content marketing?

When you sit down and really think about it, you’ll be surprised by how many ways you can come up with to expand the reach of your existing content marketing. In fact, you may have thought of things that I haven’t even covered here.

Let us know your ideas in the comments!