I’ve been blogging for more than ten years now, and I thoroughly enjoy the process. However, one thing that I dislike about blogging (especially if you blog a lot) is how easy it is to neglect your old content.
Imagine this: you spend hours and days researching the topic and writing an article to never come back to it after a year or two of active blogging. Only a couple of my articles from all those 10 years of writing keep coming back to me (they are still being referenced by others, and I get reminded of them through monitoring my name and seeing blog trackbacks). Most of my content goes down into the blog archives, and I seldom or never go back to look at it again.
And most bloggers I know are like that. They are more focused on finding new topics and writing new articles than analyzing if they’re doing their best to utilize what they wrote in the past. And it’s a real shame: the content you wrote a few years ago is a huge asset. It has already accumulated some authority through backlinks over the years, and it may be getting clicks too. You may be one step away from seeing a solid boost in traffic. Or you may be losing conversions because that older content doesn’t have your up-to-date calls to action.
In either case, make old content optimization part of your monthly (or at least quarterly) blogging routine. You can boost your conversions without you having to write a brand-new article. Here are a couple of ideas.
1. Generate More Conversions for Your Best-Performing Old Content
Have you checked your most successful content recently? You probably have, but here’s a quick reminder: do it! And if you use Google’s Search Console, it’s very easy!
Go to:
Performance -> Click “Pages” tab
You can also change the time frame to 16 months to get a better picture. The report lists your top-performing pages:
From there, brainstorm the best way to optimize your best-performing content so you generate more leads without losing incoming traffic.
How ChatGPT can help:
Use ChatGPT to write your contextual calls-to-action which will trigger more sales or email sign-ups. Here’s the prompt:
This is my article [COPY-PASTE YOUR CONTENT / GIVE IT YOUR URL]. I’d like more of my readers to [PROVIDE YOUR CTA HERE]. Come up with 2-3 contextual CTAs that I can add inside my content. Use the problem-solution strategy. My CTAs should act as solutions to describe problems or answers to the included questions.
Here’s how you can use this prompt:
Use your high-ranking content to drive more clicks to your “money” landing page. The easiest way to optimize your well-performing old content is to add an easy-to-notice in-content link to your main landing page. This will also improve the rankings of your important money page because internal linking helps pages rank higher in Google.
Add an in-content call to action. Another non-intrusive way to add an in-content call to action without being too “salesy” is to use a two-step opt-in option. With a two-step opt-in, readers don’t see a form right within the content and have to click a link for it to load. This is an nonintrusive in-content conversion optimization tactic as it doesn’t force opt-in forms inside the content and thus looks very legit.
3. Repackage Your Old Content into Visuals and Videos
Diversifying content formats broadens marketing channels you can use to generate more traffic and conversions. You can create useful visualizations/infographics and videos using your content by utilizing existing content and research:
Create flowcharts, presentations, and/or visual quotes (if you have an expert featured in your content)
Put together a quick video slideshow listing key takeaways or steps from your content.
Visme is a nice tool that can help you create both without the need to install any additional software. It is also very easy to use:
New content formats will also allow you to develop new channels, so make sure to always take it one step further:
Set up a Youtube channel. Even if you are not going to publish a lot of videos or become a Youtube star, those videos will likely rank in Google generating more brand awareness. This AI-powered Youtube channel name generator will help you create the whole Youtube branding identity from a single prompt!
Set up a newsletter. Once you refresh your content and add more visual assets to it, you can actually repurpose it into newsletter content to send to your subscribers. That’s another channel not to neglect!
Never forget to make your life easier with ChatGPT prompts. Here you can prompt it to:
Write an original Youtube video description (including tags)
Create your newsletter content based on your article
4. Re-optimize Your Content to Get More Traffic
While you are there looking through your best-performing content pages, you are likely to notice some of your content not performing as well as you’d hope. It may still get clicks, but you naturally want more.
Save those URLs to explore what you can do to improve their performance, especially when it comes to search referral traffic. That one is usually there to stay.
You can also optimize your article for a group of keywords.
The first step is to analyze if you are doing your best when it comes to selecting the most effective keywords. Run your usual keyword research routine based on each article topic and identify some phrases that may have some potential. If the topic is not too specific, you may want to cluster (i.e., group) those keywords to optimize your content for several of them.
Keyword clustering is the process of categorizing your keyword lists by a more specific topic.
How ChatGPT can help:
Instead of going through your keyword lists and finding keywords that can be used in your article, ask ChatGPT to help. Here’s the prompt:
My article topic is [TITLE]. Here’s my target keyword list. Determine a keyword group that applies to this topic. Create a table with the following columns: (1) keyword (2) its search intent (3) a new section in the article that would introduce it to my content.
Here are more prompt ideas for SEO analysis and here’s also a custom GPT for SEO which can provide a more detailed query analysis.
It’s a great tactic for re-addressing your old content rankings and making sure your blog posts target a group of related keywords instead of just one. These powerful SEO plugins for WordPress can also help you optimize your old content more efficiently.
7. Re-Share Your Old Content on Social Media
Social media platforms help on many levels, not just shares and clicks. They put your content out there, again and again, driving fresh mentions and links. Both help in rankings, building trust, and, thus, conversions.
How ChatGPT can help:
Instead of writing social media updates or captions from scratch, have ChatGPT create them for you with the following prompt:
Here’s my article [TEXT]. Come up with 5 tweets, one Instagram caption, one Linkedin post, and one Facebook post for me to promote it on social media. Add emojis and make each of these updates a value-add instead of a promotional copy.
You can also use ViralContentBee [Disclaimer: This is the project I co-founded] which is a free platform that puts your content in front of active social media sharers. One of the biggest benefits of using it is that, as long as you keep adding credits to your content, it will rotate your content again and again, bringing you fresh shares to your older (but still useful) content.
I have about ten years’ worth of content rotating there, and I see it shared to this day, bringing ongoing traffic. Apart from the obvious benefit (of putting my content in front of more people who can link to it), these social media mentions also bring that content to my attention. This encourages me to update it if anything becomes out-of-date or to write a follow-up.
Good luck making the most of your old content!
The post How to Recycle Old Content to Increase Your Conversions (+ChatGPT Prompts!) appeared first on Convince & Convert.