You could create a constant stream of new content for your website. In fact it’s vital, a sure-fire way to keep search engines like Google happy, and engage your audience on an ongoing basis. But there’s another way. What happens to old content, the stuff you spent so much time and effort building months or even years ago? Can you revisit it, update it, improve existing content and re-share it?
Yes, you can. And it’s a jolly good idea. There’s no guarantee that someone reading today’s new blog post has also read the posts you wrote three, five or even ten years ago. If the information isn’t 100% relevant any more, or is completely out of date, there’s still a story to tell, even if it’s just a history lesson.
Here are 19 easy ways to improve existing content – even if it’s really old stuff – to make it worth re-surfacing and re-sharing.
How to refresh existing content and make it worth re-sharing
- Rewrite old content completely – from start to finish – to suit today’s changed circumstances
- Add a P.S or an italic note under each paragraph to reveal the latest thinking / new research / what happens these days – effectively turning old posts into a history lesson
- Improve your H2 and H3 headers to include relevant keywords
- Add bullets and numbered lists to make your message more visually appealing
- If a previously vital post has become totally irrelevant, it’s a story in itself. What’s happened?
- Include no-followed outbound links to pertinent information
- Expand on the subject so you cover it more broadly
- Drill down and go into much more depth
- Add examples and samples
- Tie different pieces of old content together by adding links to similar posts
- Improve the original images or add more
- Add meta data, or improve the existing meta data
- Turn the information into an infographic
- Add a comment on each paragraph to create a compelling call-and-response type of post
- Ask and answer questions that arose in the original
- Re-purpose it so it fulfils a different brief
- Play devil’s advocate and argue against your original propositions
- Add useful tags
- Add a case study or customer feedback to support your argument
