Why I need to recycle old blog posts?
If you have been blogging for a while, you must have written quite a few articles on your blog.
You probably have a few favorites, while most are lying there just adding to the total number of blog posts on your blog.
You might have written one great blog post one year back, but now it’s buried under hundreds of new blog posts on your blog.
Such articles reside in our blog’s archives but we don’t remember when we wrote them, so ultimately we forget them and keep adding new information on our blog.
To prevent that from happening we need to recycle old blog posts.
When I started blogging 2 years back, I was very bad at writing and kept adding one article daily (all newbies do this) without even caring about the quality of my blog posts.
I was giving life to my blog, but when I read those articles today, they look like crap.
So what can be done with these blog posts, which we wrote in the beginning of our blogging career?Download this PDF
Why You Should Edit Or Remove Old Blog Posts
For most online businesses, blogging is playing a very vital role in their content marketing strategy.
People come on your blog to learn something new or get rid of some common problems. If you fail to deliver quality content then you defeat the very purpose of your blog.
You would agree with my point that we keep learning new things in internet marketing and our writing skills keep improving day after day.
Don’t you?
So the content which we have written 2 years back cannot match the quality, which we are writing today.
In that case it is necessary to add value to those articles.
Your article must be good enough to hold the reader’s attention and entice him/her to browse for more articles on your blog.
But if he/she lands on your poorly written article then he/she is not going to show any interest to read any more of your articles.
Many of your blog posts might be outdated as well, so updating them and adding more value can give you an extra edge in blogging.
In short – you must keep updating old articles on your blog to make a better place for your readers.
How To Recycle Old Content
Before proceeding further I would like to teach you the very first and crucial step to identifying useless posts.
Follow these steps to remove links from your blog.
Step 1: Go to Google Webmaster.
Step 2: Open your blog (If you have submitted to Google Webmaster).
Step 3: Click on Google Index > Remove URLs.
Step 4: Click on create a new removal request.
Step 5: Add the link and click continue.
Step 6: Keep the reason as default and click on Submit request.
Here you are telling Google that you don’t want to keep this article on your blog so please deindex this from search results.
In 48-72 hours Google will deindex your article from search engines.
You can search your article’s URL in Google and cross-check if they have completely deindexed it or not.
See my URL is no where in the search results now.
After getting confirmation you can use your article somewhere else.
5 Ways To Re-purpose Old Content
#1. Republish them on your blog
I do this every month.
If you have installed Google Analytics on your blog then you can check which articles on your blog are getting very little traffic and which ones are completely dead. By identifying such articles you can make a list and add value to them.
You can pick those dead articles, deindex them from Google and then start adding value to them. Adding value in an already written article is much easier than writing a brand new article, so pick them in your free time and re-furnish them.
Here are some ways to improve them
- Make them longer and more in depth
- Add images and video
- Site more sources in them
- Link to some of your more recent posts
- Improve the headline
While re-publishing take care of the things mentioned above.
In this way you will be able to lessen the writing burden as well as make your blog more awesome by converting them into high-quality articles.
#2. Publish them as guest posts
This article itself was written on my blog in 2012. As I was a newbie those days so the amount of information which I was able to add then was much less than now.
I wrote this article with title – “How to use your old blog posts.”
And the amount of information which I added in that article was much less than what I am adding today.
Make sure that you have deindexed your article properly from various search engines if you are going to submit your article as guest posts on any good blog, because if the blog’s owner finds it copied or curated then he is not going to accept any article from you in the future.
#3. Make Slides
After adding more value to these articles you can make good looking slides and then share them on slide sharing websites.
You can submit your slides on SlideShare, Scribd, SlideSnack, SlideBoom or any other good slide sharing website to get more links and exposure for your blog.
Almost all slide sharing websites are high pagerank, high authority websites so a well optimized slide is very easy to rank on slide sharing websites.
#4. Spin them and do link building
You can spin your old articles and submit them on various link building websites in bulk. Tools like The Best Spinner (http://thebestspinner.com/) will generate many copies of your content by varying sentences and paragraphs keeping the topic’s flow in same direction.
You can use this spun content with various link building tools and make quality links for your niche blogs.
#5. Get new writing ideas and change the format
Old posts are the best ways to get new ideas. As you have already written on that particular topic, polishing it is not be a difficult task for you.
Old articles are a great source of self-motivation also, as you have written those articles 1-2 years back so giving it life again will make you much happier and you will be able to devote more time polishing it.
You can change the format of article, like making it a presentation or video blog post, as mentioned above.
Final words
Be happy if you have too many old articles on your blog. 🙂
Because now you know how you can utilize them and benefit from them. Utilize them properly and touch more audience with your creativity.
Author Bio:
This article has been written by Kulwant Nagi. He is an internet marketing expert from India who shares blogging, SEO and affiliate marketing tips on his blog (BloggingCage.com). You can follow him on twitter @kulwantnagi.
