3 Reasons Publishers Should Re-purpose Old Content

There are many reasons why a publisher might want to re-purpose old content but the thee most common are to bring new readers to old content (i.e drive more traffic for advertisers), to save money and time in creating new content and to improve SEO & simplify social media sharing. Let's take a closer look:

Bring New Readers to Old Content

Why would you want to help readers find old content? It's quite simple really. 

You want more traffic, followers, subscribers, etc. so that it makes it easier to sell advertising! 

Most readers aren't going to take the time to search through your old archives unless they are looking for something specific (and even then their more likely to Google it).

In this day in age they are much more likely to click a link they see in an email or on Facebook, scan the article and then disappear.

If you're really lucky they may click back to you home page and scan the headlines but even in this scenario your traffic is likely to be limited. You could rely solely on organic search (i.e., someone searching and finding your articles in Google) to bring new readers to old content on your site but that isn't a very proactive way of helping people (re)discover all the great content you've worked so hard to create. 

So, how can you be more proactive?

The simplest solution is to periodically share older content via social media and in emails. For example, if you covered an event last year you may share that article before the same event this year with a teaser. Both of these methods drive a majority of your current traffic to your site so why not share older articles in the same way?

This way you can drive more traffic without having to create brand new content which can be time consuming and expensive.

Save Money and Time

As mentioned above, creating new content is expensive and time-consuming but it's critically important to driving traffic and engagement online and revenue for your business.

Publishers who are serious about growing the digital arm of their business need to be posting new content consistently and not just when the new print issue comes out. This is because people expect more timely and regular updates online.

The easiest way to increase the number of articles you publish online is to periodically share older content.

Of course, you could just promote an older article back to your home page but a better solution is to create a new article (something like "The best from October 2013: Halloween Costumes, Planning for the Holiday's and Preparing Your Home for Winter") that then references 3 or more older articles.

For example, you could find your 3 best articles from the same month in the previous year as highlighted above, write a brief intro paragraph to give it context and then add the three titles of the articles along with an image, description and link to the articles you chose.

Alternatively, you could pick a theme such as Halloween and choose only Halloween related articles from the last several years. Whatever you choose, the point is you've saved an incredible amount of time and money by reusing old content to create a brand new article.

Improve SEO & Simplify Social Media Sharing

When you are looking for somewhere to take your kids trick or treating, do you go to Google and type in "does the mall have trick or treating" or do you type in something more like "where can I go trick or treating in Folsom"?

For the majority of us, we'll type the latter. For this reason, creating new articles as outlined above is a great way to make your content more search engine friendly. Revisiting the example above, we could have created an article for "Top 5 Places to Go Trick or Treating in Folsom" which would be a great fit for the persons search.

In that article, we could list 5 places to go trick or treating (making sure to reference local businesses from your directory), several events from your calendar and perhaps even an article you wrote last year about an event that was really popular.

These types of articles are extremely valuable to your readers and also great for you because it makes great content to share in your emails and on Facebook. Now when someone clicks a link they see in an email or on Facebook, they find a lot of related info that keeps them clicking around your site. This is what we refer to as engagement.