How to Refresh Your Content Archive

There’s a certain amount of work that goes into all those blog posts, podcast episodes, edited videos, and social media posts you launch. This content needs a breath of new life to ensure that it works for you over a long period of time and not just the first week you publish it.

So many online content creators work hard to produce their content, publish it, market it for a week, and then they move on to the next piece of content. They forget about what they’ve already created. I’ll admit, I used to be in that boat. But two years ago, I took stock and realized just how much-archived content I had on my site and how much traffic wasn’t getting to it.

So many online content creators work hard to produce their content, publish it, market it for a week, and then they move on to the next piece of content. They forget about what they’ve already created. #Youpreneur Click To Tweet

Here are a few quick tips on how to breathe new life into your content archive, whether you’re a blogger, podcaster, or video marketer.

1. Take Inventory and Prioritize

Take a look at all of your popular or top-performing pieces of content using Google Analytics. Consider page views, social shares, and bounce rate as you choose your top-performing blogs, episodes, or videos. Eliminate anything from the list that you’ve published in the last 30-60 days. We’re looking for older content here. Go deep down into your Google Analytics, and you’ll see how many views your older content is getting. Keep the top 5-10 pieces of content and work on them, starting with the most popular.

2. Improve SEO

You should already be optimizing your content, but you want to particularly look at successful pieces from your archive. Look at what SEO is there, and more importantly, what’s not there. As time has gone by, your topic focus might have changed. Tweak and boost SEO for your current business. If you’ve got a lot of content in your archive from a year ago, SEO can be a game-changer for bringing in new traffic.

Revise your blog post titles, add new meta-tags, and make sure you have good, solid descriptions in place. Your posts need to be more click-worthy and keyword-friendly. If that means you have to spend 10-15 minutes tweaking the content, then that’s just what you’ve got to do.

3. Promote on Social Media

Create a content calendar and use a social media scheduler to share your revamped content. Use quotes, images, and articles to interest your social audience. The fact of the matter is, social media promotion is the key to breathe new life into your older content.

4. Backlinking

I’m not a techie-head at all, but I know backlinking is important. When you can, link back to your older posts in your archive from your newer posts and vice versa. Google wants to see that your old content is as important as your new content. This can have a massive effect on clickthrough rates. Start backlinking and generally become more aware of what you’re linking to in your posts.

5. Refresh Older Posts

You might need to tweak a few things in your older content. Even the best blog posts can end up disappearing into your archive. Bring them back to life with updates, revisions, and new images or video. Here’s a hot tip for you, don’t forget to weed out any broken links. Take care of that, and you might even improve your Google ranking. Add in resources or affiliate links to freshen up your post to a whole new level.

6. Create Roundup Posts

Go through your archives and search for posts with similar topics. Create a roundup post for your audience sharing a list of all your old posts in one convenient new post. I love this stuff. I do it on a regular basis. This gives your visitors the chance to discover a collection of different types of content you’ve created in the past all focused on one topic.

7. Work the Sidebar

Link to the most popular posts in your website sidebar to catch your audience’s attention and drive traffic back to your posts. You can also use this section to promote posts focused on conversions to affiliates or your own products and services.

8. Use New Formats Regularly

Your audience will consume content in many different ways. That’s why it’s important to repurpose your older content into newer formats. For example, this blog is me repurposing content from Youpreneur FM. You might have a really, really successful blog post that’s been shared hundreds of times that you could turn into a slideshow presentation and put it up on SlideShare. You might have a Youtube video that’s being viewed thousands of times over the last year. Why not turn that into a blog post? Use your older content to create newer content in new or different formats. Give your audience lots of different ways to find and consume that content.

9. Listen to Your Audience

This is my final tip here. Find out how your audience prefers to consume their content and give it to them in the way they want to consume it. Make it easy for your visitors to consume anything you produce, and they’ll be way more likely to share it. This creates a viral marketing effect for you without any extra cost.