Content Marketing Part 9 – What to do with all those old blog posts

This is something everyone struggles with (even us web copywriters); what to do with all those old posts? In our previous post in the series, we discussed one way you can recycle your blog posts into ebooks for content marketing. But that’s not all you can do.

Direct your audience to old posts

We tend to get caught up in our own stories and we forget that there is a regular ‘churn’ to customers and prospects. At any time, part of your audience will be new and in all likelihood they haven’t seen your older posts. Make it a part of your content marketing strategy to actively go back and direct your audience to older posts through your newsletter, Twitter and other marketing channels.

Start here

One easy way to direct your new customers and prospects to your older posts is to create page/post just for them. You’ll have seen these signposted on other blogs as ‘Start here’ or ‘New? Learn more’ or something along those lines. The great thing about this is that you get to set out what you believe tells your story in the best way.

Create a ‘most popular’ list or post

You’ll notice that many blogs have a ‘most popular’ category listing the 5 or 10 posts that are ‘most popular’ on the site.

This is a good way of pointing both new and returning visitors to the content that your readers have chosen. You can set this up as either most read or most commented.

Update the post with new information and send it out again

Revisit your old posts to see if anything has changed since you wrote it. Can you update the information with recent developments and additional information?

You could update the post itself and send it out again to your audience, explaining the updates.

Or you could write a new post with updated information that builds on the previous post (with links back to the older post for reference).

By actively directing your audience to older posts, and keeping them up-to-date, you’ll be engaging both new and returning readers/customers/prospects with your content marketing.