Update Old Blog Posts

What does it mean to update old blog posts? Well, you can spruce up your blog posts the same way you spruce up your home.

You spend a lot of time creating your content. Don’t just publish them and never promote them again. By spending some time revitalizing old blog posts, you will be able to attract new people to your blog and grow your mailing list.

How should you begin?

You want to start by figuring out what your most popular blog posts are, and you can do this by checking out your stats with Google Analytics, which is a free tool. After that you can work backwards by publication date.

The first thing you’re going to look at is if the content is still relevant. Take out anything in the post that isn’t relevant and then add any new or updated info that would be helpful to the people that are reading the post.

For example, a post that was written in 2008 that listed various types of marketing methods might have a paragraph about MySpace. Obviously no one’s using MySpace anymore. That can be taken out and new info about Pinterest and Instagram can be added in.

Add New Photos and Graphics

You also want to add some new photos and graphics. You can use the free version of Canva to create some really good looking graphics. They have some really awesome templates that you can use. If you need some free stock photos, you can go to unsplash.com or Pixabay.com.

Add a Content Upgrade

Next, you will want to add an opt-in form for a content upgrade. A content upgrade is a Freebie of some sort. It can be a video or a checklist or resource list, something that you offer at the end of your post in exchange for someone’s name and email address.

Ideally, you’ll have a few different content upgrades, and you can offer one at the end of each post. For example, let’s say that you’re a professional organizer and you have tips about cleaning up bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms and so forth, and those are the different categories on your blog.

Ideally, you would create one content upgrade to match each of those categories. Anytime you write a post about kitchens you offer the content upgrade about organizing a kitchen pantry. Anytime you’re writing a post about organizing bedrooms, you offer the content upgrade with tips about organizing bedrooms, and so forth.

Do Some Keyword Research

Next, it’s time to do some keyword research. Try to find some new keywords that you can add to the post. Those additional keywords should help you bring in more relevant traffic.

Publish Date

Now let’s talk about the publish date. You’ve worked really hard on refreshing your blog post. You can keep the original published date on the post, or you can update the publish date to the current date, or schedule it to post on a future date.

If you keep the original published date, you want to add a note at the top of that post that says updated with new Info on ______ and then put the date that you updated the post, so people know when it was updated.

If you decide that you want to update the publish date to the current date, you want to delete any previous comments on the post. If someone’s looking at it and see the publish date was the same week that they’re reading it, but they see comments on it from 2012, that is going to be weird.

After you update old blog posts, you need to put this in your promotion calendar and keep promoting it.