How to Rejuvenate Your Content Without Learning New Skills

It's possible.

We're going to talk about three ways to breathe new life into your old content to improve SEO and get new views.

Let's Go Over a Couple of Ground Rules Before We Start

1. While it would be extremely easy to do, don't take your target post and simply copy/paste it into a new post. Google will still penalize you for the duplicate content and getting back on google again may not be a quick thing. And, well, it's just a bad form.

2. Choose the right content to repurpose. Pick informative posts where the content isn't going to change regularly. Evergreen content is the way to go. However, if your site is highly topical or news-oriented, there are ways that you can give it a little boost, as well (we'll go into that later)

Now that we've gotten those out of the way, let's get to the real reason that you came to this post: how DO you rejuvenate that old content that's just laying around?

Upgrade Your Article

When you're searching through your past articles, you'll inevitably find some that had great ideas which weren't explained well enough or didn't go far enough. Here are some questions you can ask about these articles.

1. Can a cheat sheet be made from the information in this article? Maybe a step-by-step handout that you can use as a lead generation machine?

2. Can you connect your article to any new articles which have been published by you or your team? You can put more links into it to make it more useful.

3. Is there more data? Without changing the URL of the article (You want to keep that for the already existing SEO goodness), can you add more points to the article (if it's a listicle?). Or a few more links to new data? People love bonus hints.

Curate Your Own Content

Curation creates a new post, but it rejuvenates the old posts as well. With this technique, you curate your own content to create a pillar post. This method is used by the big guys to do their internal blog linking.

Here Are Some Examples

You run a news site and have watched something develop right before your eyes. The articles that you've written in the past help to give the overview of the event. Create a drop dead gorgeous interactive timeline of the event with explanations (contained in previous blog posts) on the side.

Overview posts aren't just for news, either. It works for anything that naturally turns into a list post. Recipes. Tips for a better life. Ways to outsmart the competition. Productivity methods. That new outline article uses your other articles as its foundation.

Take It to Another Platform

Fantastic evergreen content offers specific insights which aren't going to go away or change drastically from one year to the next. Let's say that when you wrote the article, you put in the social media blurb and talked about it on Facebook and Twitter.

If the post is more than six months old, there's a high likelihood that your readership has forgotten about it. They could use a reminder and it doesn’t hurt your site’s SEO.

What If You Could Expose It to an Entirely New Audience? 

Are there questions on Quora which could be answered by the information in your post? Can you alter your answer to include the blog post link during the discussion?

How about Reddit? Redditors dislike self-aggrandizement, but if you're giving answers that are spot-on with answering the question, people are thankful.  You have to make sure that your evergreen content goes beyond good for Reddit.

LinkedIn excels as a place to do business. When you first wrote the post, did you bring your ideas there? LinkedIn Groups are fantastic for rejuvenating your old writing, as long as you have not done it before.

These three methods take the old content that you've written and places it front and center again.  It might not be new to you, but it's potentially new to the audience that you're writing for... and THEY are what matter.