So, do you promote your old content for your blog, YouTube or whatever your platform is?
You know the pattern: create awesome content, promote it and hope everyone sees it. Then we bank on SEO sending people our way.
Job done! Time to move on?
Well, yes move on but don’t let that content sit in the archive gathering dust. The hard part is done, you’ve produced the content so why not get more bang for your buck and consistently keep it alive by repromoting it?
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Here’s why you should promote your old content.
Besides the obvious benefit of getting more traffic, there’s even more to be gained from the practice of promoting old content:
- You can improve search engine rankings with the extra backlinks and social signals
- You get to offer that value to a new, fresh audience.
- You can boost your status by showing content you know performs well.
- Naturally, it all leads to more traffic
But what can you do to get the word out? Well there’s some obvious and less obvious stuff below, hopefully this list will help you.
So below is a video covering these methods, but also written out beneath if you don’t want to watch the video.
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Now before you go off and repromote, make sure your content is:
- High quality and offers value
- evergreen so it can continue to be valuable after it’s published
- relevant to your niche.
Here’s what you can do!
Interlink with new content
Interlinking posts on a blog is awesome for SEO, and interlinking on YouTube is also a good promotional method.
When ever you create new content, think about what other content it could naturally lead into and then suggest it. In a blog it’s a simple text link in your conclusion, with a video on YouTube it’s adding links the description, video cards and an End screen.
You can also do these two things right now to any blog post or YouTube video that’s already published. Yes you can edit a post and a video description, card or Endscreen – these can be added or altered at any time: here’s how to do add end cards.
See what I did there? I promoted an old blog post and video at the same time ;)
That reminds me…
Repurpose old content onto another platform
Recreate it for another medium and link the two up!
So you have a YouTube video. Write a post and embed the video. Or maybe you have a post? Vice versa, create a video. You can literally turn great content into a few things and pop a link to it (in most cases):
- Blog Post
- Youtube Video
- A podcast
- Slideshare Slideshow
- Instagram presentation
- Infographic
By switching formats you attract a different audience and bring attention to your presence in general. Linking it up adds the benefit of that old content being seen by association.
Add it into an Email Autoresponder Series
Create an Email Autoresponder series if you don’t have one!
Don’t know what that is? The idea is to create an email newsletter and after people sign up you can have a series of emails pre-loaded and ready to send.
I do this with ConvertKit but also set things up with their automation tools so that people only get emails suited them, based on their interests as you can tag subscribers based on their behavior or choices when signing up. It’s exceptionally powerful.
This means every time someone signs up to your newsletter, you can deliver your best content to them so they don’t miss out. But make it’s actually relevent to the reason they signed up, don’t spam your readers.
Create Larger, Broader Posts/Videos that link off
Create Posts that are purposely designed to link out to older content. These can be broader topics or even just lists that guide people into more specific content as part of a larger process.
Some ideas are:
- Curate into a Round Up Post
- Create Top Lists with items being summaries of the content they link to
- ‘Beginners Guide’ Posts with steps, linking out to more in-depth information within steps.
You get the idea.
Email, DM, send your content to people personally.
if you’re actively engaging people in the comments section of your blog or YouTube, chatting with them in DM’s or responding to questions sent via email – then don’t be afraid to answer relevant questions with a link to a relevant blogpost.
People are looking for personal recommendations or answers from you, so why not give them your personal, fully fleshed out answer that you put so much time into? They may end up sharing it.
Reshare on social media!
Schedule your content with buffer and send it out regularly or even share it manually. There’s nothing wrong with simply posting it again on social media – especially on a newer platform/account where it hasn’t been shared!
Some ideas are:
- Share the link on Facebook
- Grab a quote or snippet, turn it into an image, share it and then link to the content it is from
- Schedule it into Twitter with Tweetdeck, tweet it 3 or 4 times at different hours of the day over the next week
It’s a simple thing that can help bring some new life into that old content so get onto it!
Update it and Republish
Sometimes that old content is just not relevant anymore, it’s old and outdated.
Make it new and fresh!
Scan over it and see what you need to change to update it and while you’re there try to improve it even further.
By doing this it becomes an exciting new piece of content but with less work than starting from scratch. You can the go ahead and promote it like new content, giving it more life.
Create resources pages on your website
Figure out the main, broad topic your blog covers and create pages dedicated to those broader topics.
Introduce the topic and recommend a series of blog posts / videos (your old content) people can watch to get started.
This gives visitors a nice central place to land and explore your content, so it adds a lot of value for readers.
Promote to Groups
A massive percentage of social media platforms have groups, where like minded people can join to discuss a particular topic.
So join relevant groups and post your new or old content there! You can repromote your best content to groups when you first join. Some examples are:
- Facebook Groups
- LinkedIn Groups
- Pinterest Group boards
- To some degree, targeted Hashtags on Twitter & Instagram
But make sure you interact with the group, don’t just spam them. Offer real value to the group.
Turn it into a series (or follow up)
You can write a follow up to an old post, linking back to it in reference, or even use that old content as part of a series of posts, designed to be read in order to cover a large topic.
I did this with my post ‘Traffic Tips from the Experts’ and the follow-up post here explaining the strategy around it. You see if people read the follow-up, they may be intrigued by the content it is discussing and click through.
This can be done in a YouTube video series added into a Playlist (tick the ‘Set as official series for this playlist’ under Playlist settings.)
Do this and multiple pieces of content will support each other and spread the audience among them.
Design a Pin and promote it on Pinterest
Sure, this could fall under ‘re-promote on social media’ but it’s a little different.
Pinterest is more of a search engine based platform than a feed platform so posts that do well will continue to for a much longer time than a post on Facebook,twitter or Instagram.
With this in mind, create an image like the one at the top of this post (1000 x 1500px) and pin it to your account. If you have already then create a new pin, replace it and pin that! You can do this over and over if you want.
Another tip for Pinterest? Check out the next one…
Improve or re-optimize for search
Search Engine algorithms evolve over time and so should your SEO approach with it. You may also be learning more and more about SEO as you go so you can use that knowledge to boost old content.
So review your old content and do an SEO audit for anything you’ve missed in the past. Check out your ‘on-page SEO’ / YouTube SEO and make some adjustments.
Adding or updating your content as mentioned earlier could be another way to help with SEO also.
Again, this leads into the next tip…
Build more Baclinks
I don’t mean black hat stuff, spamming directories or doing cheap backlink building behavior – but proper whitehat promotion of your link.
Find pages that link to similar resources to your content and if yours is more complete, email the site owner and see if they’ll switch out the link. This also works for broken links or even just relevant pages on websites.
Backlink building is a whole other skill set though, I highly recommend checking out Backlinko’s website for information on building links.
Run some ads
If you have some money you can invest, you can always run some paid ads to your content.
The big thing here is make sure there’s some return on your investment. So if your post gets you a lot of subscribers, I would consider running ads to it and tracking that converrsion rate.
But if you notice that people are just bouncing and you gain nothing from running ads, this method may not be worth it.
Answer questions in quora, comments and forums
Your content should always solve a problem. So if people are asking the question, give them the answer!
So search out and pay attention to somethings like:
- Relevant forums or Q&A sites like Quora or even Reddit
- Comments in Blog posts, social media and videos
- Questions sent via email
- Find content about the problem and leave a comment with some basic advice, and a link.
This is a direct response to someone needing your solution! So don’t overlook it.
Link to your content in Guest Posts
Seek out reputable places to submit Guest Posts to and write a compelling and highly valuable post. Within it, link off to resources that may help – including your blog posts.
This enables you to expose yourself to other audiences that haven’t seen your work and can be a powerful way to build a stronger network, as you engage other site owners.
Never underestimate the power of association either, as a reputable blog with your content on it will only help elevate your reputation.
Make a list and get started!
Those are the tips I have for you, so what’s next?
List the posts you want to re-promote and a list of methods you want try – then get out there and give it a go!
Hopefully that has given you some insight and action to take in order to help you grow your online presence and further elevate the effects of your existing hardwork.
If you liked this post, please consider subscribing for more like it! Also, if you have any input or ideas not shown here, leave a comment below! I’ll also consider adding some of these methods with a link in my next update.
Otherwise, have a great day and I hope to talk again soon :)
