5 Reasons Why Reusing Old Content is Great for Your Business

Recently, as part of my content marketing strategy, I’ve been reaching back into the archives for my platforms to identify and reuse some older pieces of content. If you are an OG follower, perhaps you noticed this, but my guess is that most of you had no clue I was doing this and have done this from time to time. So, today I wanted to explain more about this strategy to you by sharing 5 reasons why reusing content is great for your business!

Reason #1: Reusing old content saves you time and energy on content creation

I don’t know about your editorial calendar but mine is back on a pretty tight schedule. Three blog posts, a new video, and at least one email a week. That’s a lot of content to produce on a weekly basis. And of course, that’s not even bringing social media posts into consideration. Of course, not each and every piece of content is wholly unique. I have some consistent messages that I reiterate, but the truth is much of my content is created the week it goes out and that takes a lot of time, creative ideas and energy to make happen. So, when I can find and reuse an old piece of my content, it conserves some of that energy for higher priority work. This may look like reposting an old blog post, using a blog post as an outline for a video script (or visa versa) or reworking a blog post for an email and although I don’t replace 100% of my content creation with old posts, just integrating one old piece a week into my calendar is a major time saver!

Reason #2: Most of your audience isn’t seeing everything you’ve created

Believe it or not, as much as your current audience may love what you produce, the vast majority of them aren’t seeing everything you create. That means, they likely missed some older posts that you worked really hard on at the time, so serving them up some older ideas will still seem new and fresh to the majority of your following. This is especially true if you’ve been creating for years and have a backlog of old content just sitting their unloved. Yes, thanks to SEO those great posts aren’t completely covered in cobwebs, but by reposting or repurposing that content you will get extra life out of it.

Reason #3: Reposting is a great way to update content or test out different keywords

Although a majority of my content is evergreen, meaning that it is applicable to the right audience at any time of the year and doesn’t necessarily show it’s age, it is still a good idea to keep some key content up to date. This is something I like to do with old blog posts that may walkthrough older versions of my inserts. The post itself may perform well in terms of SEO but old pictures or examples can date the content, and older links can be broken or lead to no where. Reposting is a great way to keep valuable content up to date and at the same time, test out new keywords on your content as well. This is a strategy you will often see me use on post or video titles. I will change the title of a blog post during an update and post the new information, then see if the new title with slightly different keywords performs better or worse than the original title.

Reason #4: If content didn’t perform well on one platform it may do better on another

Sometimes we work hard to create valuable content but it flops. One reason that may have happened is because the content itself wasn’t right for the platform. Perhaps you created a youtube video that would have done better on Instagram, or recorded a podcast that should have been a blog post. Factors across platforms vary and some content just performs better in certain settings. So, if you took the time to create some great content, but you don’t see it getting the attention you believe it deserves, repurpose it to another platform and see if it does better somewhere else. Although most of my content and platforms are pretty consistent, I find that I have a slightly different audience on my Instagram, Blog and YouTube. It doesn’t matter how much I cross promote my platforms, different people will prefer different styles of content, and perhaps that underperforming post can be quickly repurposed and shared elsewhere to a warmer reception.

Reason #5: If content performed well, repurpose it on other platforms

Likewise, sometimes we create content that does very very well on a platform. In which case we know we hit the nail on the head with the topic and value and there is really no reason not to share it on other platforms. Don’t worry about cannibalizing SEO, overall it’s always better to share a message that resonates with your audience as much as possible. Plus, you don’t have to reuse the entire piece of content. If you have a video or blog post that does well, take the main message and share it on social or another platform. Consider summarizing longer content and then redirecting your audience to view the full content elsewhere. You just want to get as much mileage out of the successful content as possible because it is marketing gold!

So, those are five very excellent reasons why I like to reuse or repurpose old content from my archives and why I think this is a strategy you should consider as well. Of course, I’m not talking about making all your content ongoing a repost of something old, but reusing some old pieces in new ways along with new original ideas can be a great way to manage your time, energy and expectations as a content creator! I’d love to hear how this strategy works for you, so do leave me a comment below with your thoughts!

xoxo,