How to Repurpose Old Archived Content to Good Marketing Use

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If you follow Brian Dean on Twitter or comprehend his SEO know-how, you would have heard of the 80-20 rule of a balanced proportion between writing and promotion.

It’s not only me, but all preeminent marketers live by this rule.

Even Derek Halpern has the same secret – the 80/20 one.


The valuable lessons from his writing:

  1. Spend 4x time to market a post as compared to the time it takes to write-up and publish a post.
  2. Writing more isn’t the success formula; you should learn to market it on diversified channels.

Pro Bloggers understand how to do it efficiently. If you’ve subscribed to Quick Sprout, Matthew Woodward, and Brian Dean’s kind of pros, you’ll come to see diverse methods to promote the content.

The last time when you took a dig into your analytics dashboard, which posts were most performing in terms of page views, social media shares, and even driving inbound backlinks?

Do your old blog posts still drive traffic to you? NO?

At this stage, you need to re-audit the existing content archived on your blog.

  • If old content is not up to the current trends and barely relates to your services, you can trash it and 404 the old URLs to the most relevant blog post.
  • If old content needs a slight modification on statistics and citations part, go ahead and do the edit.
  • If you think an overhaul can turn the old post into a masterpiece that your audience would enjoy the most, re-write it and republish then.

The question is – Can you get the most out of the content that you’ve already researched, written, and published?

If your old content isn’t getting search and social traction it deserves, there is lots of stuff you can do to with them to give your marketing a major lift.

I’m going to list out some proven ways to repurpose or remarket valuable blog content.

Some options take a great deal of time; others, little more than a few clicks.

Let’s jump to the next section.

Publish an e-book. Everybody is publishing e-books these days – but that’s because readers eat them up. A downfall of blogs is the content is scattered. Bundling up like-themed posts in a PDF provides regular and new readers with real convenience.

Create downloadable PDFs. If an e-book project is too big, take two or three like-themed posts and reshape them into a downloadable PDF. PDFs also offer convenience, and make excellent calls to action on your blog.

Add calls to action. Any post in the archives that still gets traffic is an underperforming asset without an appealing offer somewhere in the content. Ask your UX designer to create a distinctive call-to-action, and then monitor the conversions.

Use excerpts as email hooks. Archived blog posts can work hand-in-hand with newsletters and email campaigns. Introduce a bit of guidance from one of your top posts in the next email blast linked to that post. You’re giving subscribers a great reason to visit your site and explore.

Schedule social media shares. Do you re-share our best stuff on Twitter and Facebook on a regular schedule? These shares almost always attract new readers, retweets, and likes. Don’t overdo it, though, or you may annoy your communities. The goal of your social media strategy should be to understand your social audience and engage them in the right way.

Bring-in links. For those truly timeless posts or ones that have become thematic again, you can alert bloggers in the appropriate niche to their existence and politely ask for a mention and backlink. Bloggers are always looking for great reference studies or reports to share with readers.  

Standard but works well; featured post widget. New and old readers are often eager to explore what you consider your best work. A featured post option draws visitors deeper into your site. Nobody is going to sift through archives looking for your gems.

Write the best-of posts. A similar approach to the featured post widget, best-of posts, give you another way to highlight your world-class content. The difference here is, best-of posts can be pushed out through social sharing, whereas widgets are for people already on your site.

Flawless Rewriting. Every time coming up with new writing can be tough. Expanding or refreshing a proven winner is much easier, so look for opportunities to reshape good, old material into something even better.

There’s always a great opportunity for great content to outrank competitors, even in specialized B2B niches like office software development or recruitment. It often pays real dividends to avoid the “out of sight, out of mind” syndrome with our published content. Consider:

  • How much time do you spend marketing new material versus marketing old material?
  • How much traffic do your best-archived posts bring in? How much traffic do your most recent posts bring in?

Looking at the numbers may suggest ways to significantly improve your marketing strategy.

Over to You What techniques do you use to drive all the benefits out of your juiciest posts?

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