Here's How to Wring Value From Outdated Blog Posts

Over the past nine years, I have consulted dozens of clients on their marketing campaigns. A lot of my assignments have been related to organic brand building and content marketing. Today’s question comes from Gregory Bullock from TheraSpecs. He asks, “What is the best strategy for dealing with outdated/low performing blog posts?”

Bullock tells me that his company website has a lot of blog posts related to clinical research from several months back. Many are outdated and do not bring any new traffic. What does one do with such content?

Related: The Secret to Successful Content Marketing In 2018 Is Having a Strategy, So Get One

This is a common issue businesses face across industries. In recent times, for example, a lot of UK-based businesses are talking about GDPR and its impact on their specific industry. There is a wealth of information to be sought here. Yet, a couple of years from now, this information is going to be redundant. Worse, if you run a news-focused business blog, your articles are going to become stale even before the week is over.

There are a number of steps you could take to fix this problem.

Categorize your content.

The first step in this process is to build a list of all your blog posts that don’t bring any traffic to your business. Put each of these articles into one of the following buckets:

Bucket 1: Outdated news content that is still relevant to a section of the audience today.

Example: This news item on The New York Times website about the U.S. Tax Bill was published in Dec. 2017 and may not bring traffic at the end of the news cycle. But it is going to be of interest to anybody in future who is researching on their taxable income.