Every year, you work through your content calendar developing a logical, consistent format that will be informative and innovative for your readers. But, what about those old posts that are still relevant or might need a little refresh to content? Can you repost or revamp them? Or should we simply just archive them and be “forgotten”?

First – let’s take inventory

When did your company start publishing blogs for your customers? Understanding the quantity that your company currently has in your blog inventory will help start the cleaning and possibly condensing process. If your site houses endless amount of content, the evergreen topics you initially posted have more than likely been redone or unfortunately, out of date and no longer evergreen.

Technically, having an extraordinary amount of blogs on your website only makes your site larger and could be effecting your load time for relevant information. It ultimately just takes up storage space that your company is throwing money at.

Some questions that you can take in to consideration when taking inventory of your blogs are:

• Is it relevant or valuable for our users?
• Is it valuable for us?
• Is it good material?
• Is it causing issues through the site or with our customers?

Second – the revamp

The list of “keepers” have finally been dwindled down! Now, how can we utilize already produced and improve their value?

Improve

Consider this as a full redesign of your materials. You have found through your inventory process that there are many voices of the brand being presented and it’s time for a makeover. You have examples of how you want to be portrayed and now is the opportunity to ensure content is adhering to brand standards because more than likely a few of those articles are similar in content, but differing in tone, message, style and design. Condensing articles to create a better formulated thought through improved target messaging, grammar, and data will help streamline thoughts in the blog and be clear and relevant to your readers.

Are the visuals out of date or missing completely due to consumer trends? Adding imagery that will make an impact to the article will actually help keep your readers on the page longer.

Refresh

This can be considered a simply refresh of your content. Small tweaks are needed when deciding to reuse this content. One big item that should be updated is the data – ensuring that it is the most current data your company has is essential in creating an authentic and trustworthy voice to your readers.

Proofing the piece to integrate new language your company is using or incorporate strategic initiatives the company is promoting will be important to enhancing the content to be current and relevant to your customers.

Also, update small design pieces that have changed through the evolution of your company. If your company has gone through a re-branding make sure the font, color palette, logos are the important to update.

Third – promote

After going through a tedious process of taking stock and re-evaluating what content can be reused or redone with a strong base, it’s time to get that on to the screens of your readers.

Promotion through social media posts (paid and organic), sharing and re-sharing content on your website are great tactics in promotion.

Other ways to promote are priority placement on your website that will drive traffic to your article and blog section for browsing. Email pushes to subscribers and paid digital ads are also important promotional tools that can increase your blogs awareness and readership.

Finally – the follow-up

All your content has now been curated and updated to meet the needs of your blog. In order to see the effectiveness of your work, reviewing the data from your web traffic from tracked links through social, email, digital ads, etc. to know what content resonates the most with your audience.

Positioning your content through effective SEO keywords and tags that can be leveraged when a user searches for specific content to ensure your blog comes close to (if not) the top of search results.

Utilizing a analytics dashboard, such as Google Analytics, will help your company to be able to digest the data coming through what content brings in the most traffic, peak times when the content is being viewed and what channel drivers the readers to the blog.

Developing and producing content that speaks to your consumers and subscribers can be taunting task. Colleen Eakins Design can help your content team develop and format visuals that work with your company’s brand identity.