Getting More Mileage out of Good Content
If you’ve written a decent blog post or article and watched the traffic come and go, you might well think that it has come to the end of its useful life – moving on to promoting newer material. However, there’s no need to put your best work out to pasture just because visits are subsiding.
A lot of the content that we produce doesn’t have a fixed shelf life. If you’re providing useful guides or have invested time in a major opinion piece, then there’s no reason to pull the plug on it just because it’s a few weeks old. Sure, you don’t want to be flogging a dead horse endlessly and completely ignoring newer work. So what’s the answer, how do you get more mileage out of your best content?
From the archives
Some social media users deliberately repackage their older work as a ‘from the archives’ feature. This can work quite well, attracting more people to view and share an article that may be months or even years old. You’ve already acknowledged that it’s not the latest post, so there is no subterfuge involved, plus it gives you something more to post about on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn.
This can be automated too, making it even easier and helping to get that little bit extra out of something that may have been buried in your archives for months.
Provide updates
If you’ve reported on a developing story or have provided certain statistics then there’s a good chance that there could be changes in the future that either back up or disprove earlier theories. There’s no harm in admitting you’re wrong or providing further evidence that you were correct either; and by adding to an existing piece you have a great opportunity to promote it all over again.
Whilst this is probably the most time-consuming way of improving the visibility of old posts, it is perhaps the most effective too. Some people do a number of updates, sometimes in quick succession, numbering each one to provide a better insight. This is particularly effective when discussing controversial subjects and awaiting feedback from related parties. When a quote is released or you hear from a frazzled PR person, get it in there and get promoting.
Link back through new content
Following a similar principle to the previous point, you can look to give your articles a push by covering related subjects in future and linking back. This way you can build further context for both posts and provide a useful resource for readers to learn more. After all, there’s no point in explaining something in detail that has already been covered a few months previously. If you can get a link in there, you have a new avenue for people to find those older, but highly valuable, pieces.
By regularly filtering traffic back through your own content, you can keep visitors on-site for longer and also encourage them to share or link to it in their own work. So, just because an article or post isn’t getting any traffic anymore, it doesn’t mean that it no longer has a use. Look to tie in your work and always keep your best work in mind when writing in the future – it may well have another purpose to serve.
