Do a Content Refresh on Your Old Blog Posts

This podcast audio served as the source for the blog post “How To Recycle Old Blog Posts.”

The transcript was rewritten to produce the blog post, which is the cornerstone of the Shortcut Content system.

Transcript:

Shayla: You are listening to the Shortcut Content Podcast and I’m talking today with founder Dave Young. And, Dave, I think one of the biggest thing people talk about is they feel like they’ve run out of topics when they go to blog. So tell me how I can recycle a previous post.

Dave: How can you recycle a previous blog post? A lot of people have blog posts that sit on their website that have been there sometimes for years, and often times, we look at a website and somebody’s linked to an old blog post or something like that and the owner of the site might think of it as evergreen content, meaning that this is timeless, it hasn’t changed, the reasons for what we expanded on in the blog post are still the same good reasons to do the things that we’re telling you to do. But, often, as a consumer, when you look at an old post like that and you see a date maybe from 2012, 2013, or even just last year, you tend to think of it as expired goods. It’s almost like, do you grab the milk in the grocery store that has an expiration date of last week, or do you grab one that’s not going to expire for three weeks?

And so those dates, even if it’s evergreen content, the date can kind of mean, this is outdated in our minds. It may not be. It may be perfectly valid information. What I like to do is tell people you can repurpose those. You can take the exact same blog post and rethink it. So what we like to do at Shortcut Content is we’ll take an old post from maybe a year ago and we can literally just ask the same question. For example, if we want to get in to an endless loop here, we could post the blog post that we’re creating by using this recording, and come back a year from now and you could ask me the exact same question, and I’d answer it in a little bit different way. I’d probably say a lot of the same things. I may say them in a little bit different order, because I wouldn’t have a script in front of me, but we could create that same blog post, with the same information, but in a fresh way, really without even going back and re-writing it.

And so that’s one way to do it is just to come towards it and re-do the exact same premise in a fresh way by asking the question anew.

In the Shortcut Content way of doing things, because it’s all sourced with spoken content, we have this audio conversation that creates the actual content that we then clean up, it makes sure that we’re never going to answer that question exactly the same way because our editors aren’t going to go back and re-look at the old posts to rewrite the new one. They’re just going to take the transcript of the new post and run with it that way. So that’s one way to repurpose an old blog post.

And there are several other ways of doing it. A good example would be if you wrote a list blog post, and we see those all the time, 5 ways of doing this or the 6 best ways of doing that, well, you can actually think of those as 6 different blog posts. You could come back to that post and actually create an individual post for each one of those reasons or list items that you created. All you have to do is dive just a little bit deeper into those topics, and you’ll end up with 5 or 6 brand new topics, depending on your list.

Now if you wrote a “How-To” post a couple years ago and you talked about how you’re supposed to do something, one of the ways that you can repurpose that post is to change it into a “Why-To” or change it into a “Who-To.” A “Who-To” post, that sounds a little strange, doesn’t it? But when we’re talking about a who post, we’re talking about taking the same premise and telling a story about it, putting a real life person into that premise and telling how they did something, how it worked out, what changed, what made their life better by taking the advice that you gave in that blog post. So really there’s a lot of ways of doing it and even though you may think that your content is evergreen, your readers may look at that and see a date on it or just see that it’s way buried in your archives, and not think of it quite as evergreen as you do. And so I think that’s one of the best reasons to go in and repurpose an old blog posts.

Shayla: So if you need help doing that, sometimes it helps to have an outsiders perspective, you can get a hold of Dave and the team at ShortcutContent.com. All the contact information is there. Thanks, Dave.

Dave: Thank you.