Recycle Old Blog Content for New Inbound Marketing Campaigns

If your company has been blogging for years, you have likely had many campaigns that have inspired blogs posts. But now that those campaigns have ended, you may be wondering: “What purpose do these posts serve now that my campaigns are over?”

Besides the obvious SEO benefit of blog posts, there is another benefit to keeping them in your repertoire: You can recycle them.

Here are a few ways to repurpose your old content to drive user engagement and traffic to new campaigns.

Something Old Meets Something New

HubSpot has this long-standing belief that if you “optimize the past,” your organic search traffic and leads will increase. They claim that when they optimized old blog posts, they doubled their monthly leads generated and increased their number of monthly organic search views on old posts by an average of 106%.

At Tribute Media, we’ve seen similar results and have found two specific ways to do this successfully.

New CTAs on Old Blogs

Calls-to-Action (CTAs) can quickly become irrelevant if you are changing up your campaigns constantly (as you should be). What once led to a webinar or workshop you hosted, may not lead to anything beneficial for your new leads. So what kind of a CTA do you use as a replacement? Ask yourself these questions:

1. What inbound marketing campaigns are you running that relate to the blog post?
2. Does the topic or subject matter align with a certain campaign CTA?

Try searching your blogs using topic tags to find applicable content.

Updating Old Blog Posts

There are always opportunities to update old blog posts. Evaluate which posts, published long ago, are still driving significant traffic to your website. Then ask yourself what you can do to keep those posts relevant. The topic may be relevant and still highly searched, but there is a high probability that the information you used all that time ago is no longer accurate and needs to be updated. Here are some tips to do so:

1. Check your facts! Are your facts and stats still correct? Could you use current information to replace the old information in the blog post?
2. Are your links still working? Take the time to click on all your links and ensure they are still working and are still relevant to your blog.
3. Stay away from old imagery. If your images look outdated or don’t align with your brand anymore, change them! Images help capture a user’s interest, and you don’t want poor image choices to turn them off from reading on.
4. Update your CTAs so they are still relevant. Traffic to a blog post that has an irrelevant call-to-action is a waste. You always want to give your users the next step to lead them through the Buyer’s Journey.

After you’ve updated your blog post and optimized it for increased SEO benefit, republish it with a new date. Readers need to know that the information is current. If you updated your content with 2017 statistics and information, it won't matter if the date of the post is still 2014.

Now sit back and relax as new site visitors engage with old content (made new again).

If you’re looking for ways to get your campaigns up and running, check out our campaign planning webinar!