Are Your Old Blog Posts Extinct?

If you are an online business owner that has been in business for a while, you may have some old blog posts that you have forgotten about. Or maybe you didn't think you could do anything with them now that they are so old. Well, that is definitely not the case. As long as you have written evergreen content, you can promote these blog posts as often as you wish.

How often have you seen people quote others of what they said or wrote 100s of years ago? You see that all of the time. That is no different than using content from your old blog posts for social media marketing and even other content marketing strategies.

"I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself." ~Marlene Dietrich

You have always had something interesting to write about and your readers from two years ago when you wrote an article may be completely different that your audience now. New readers that visit your blog may not go through all of your past posts, so why not share the content again?

If you decide to use some of your extinct posts for content marketing, make sure you "freshen" them up a bit. Take a look at the content and seen if things you had written about then have changed. If so, bring them up-to-date.

The following are some things you should do to bring those old blog posts out of extinction:

1. Up-to-date information. Make sure you didn't write about something that was trending during the time you wrote the content and is obsolete now.

A good example of this would be MySpace. Now, I know that MySpace is still around, but from what I have seen, it's mostly used by musicians now and not small businesses like it was a few years ago. Therefore, if you used MySpace as part of your social media strategy at one time and no longer use it, remove that content and maybe replace it with a newer social media network like Google+. If you do this and your blog posts show the published date on your blog, it would be a good idea to make sure you note that the information has been updated.

2. Keywords. Maybe you weren't familiar with adding keywords for SEO when you originally wrote the article, so make sure you add these to optimize the post.

Even if you did have keywords included already, you may want to update them. As we all know, SEO has changed dramatically over the years! Therefore, change some of the single keywords to keyword phrases as you should be doing with your current blog posts.

3. Images. At one time, adding images to blog posts were not as important as it is today. We have become a visual world, so your audience likes to see those pictures included with your content, so make sure there is an image included in the post.

Plus, if you are like me, you may not have been familiar with the copyright laws of using other's images in the past, so if you do have images already added to the blog posts, make sure they are owned by you or you had permission to use them.

There are many places online to find free royalty-free images, so just take your pick.

4. Titles. Take a look at the title you had used. Could you come up with a more "clickable title" that will attract people to click on it to read more? This is particularly important if you will be using the title for social media posts when you start promoting the blog post again.

You also should think about optimizing the title for SEO purposes (keywords). If you do change the title, I would suggest you do not change the URL for the post in case someone would come across the post that is listed somewhere before you "freshened" the content up.

5. Call to Action (CTA). If you had included a CTA, make sure it is not including an offer that no longer exists or maybe even change it to a different offer you are focusing on more now.

If you did not include CTA's in your blog posts, make sure you add one to help with leads.

Now that you have freshened up your extinct blog posts, start marketing the content on social media networks. You will be very surprised to see how those old blog posts will come back to life!