A high-volume, high-quality content marketing strategy is great for your business. But it’s also very demanding to keep up with and prohibitively expensive for many small businesses.

Unfortunately, one fact of the content marketing business is that content doesn’t have an infinite shelf life. It goes stale after a while. Your old blog post on SEO tips for beginners was a hit when you first published it. But now it’s not getting a lot of hits — it’s been buried under newer content.

Without a steady stream of new content and the hits it provides, your business prospects could stagnate. So what to do?

One solution is to implement a smarter, up-to-date content marketing strategy by repurposing your old content.

What does it mean to repurpose content?

Repurposing content just means you either change the content so that it reaches a different audience than the original. Or, you change the format — transforming old blog posts into an eBook, a well-researched white paper, or an infographic.

There’s always new information, new technologies, new techniques, and strategies that your business needs to talk about, and not just in terms of online marketing.

Here’s why it’s a good idea to repurpose old content and how it can help your business avoid stagnation so you can grow and stay relevant.

Why Repurposing Old Content Is a Good Idea

1. Nobody Is Going to Read Your Old Posts

Chances are, you’re quite proud of the quality of your old articles. So why should all your hard work go to waste?

Most people know that posts that are several years old aren’t going to contain relevant information anymore, so they’ll most likely skip them.

The newer a blog post is, the higher the chances that someone will read it is. The solution? Update your best old posts, correcting irrelevant info and adding new insight, and republish them with as a new-and-improved update.

2. It Helps You Reach Various Audiences

Time is a finite resource. Not everyone has the time or the interest to constantly check the blogs of websites they follow to see whether you’ve published new content or not.

But by repurposing old content, you have an opportunity to reach new audiences. Here are just two of the possibilities:

• You can talk about the main topic of an older article, while adding a new, specific focus on a certain idea or strategy that was presented in the old version but not fully explored.
• You can also reach new eyes with multi-channel marketing – repurposing content for different mediums — because you need to be present wherever your audience might be as well.

3. It’s Easy to Repurpose Your Old Content

Long-form content takes time, time that you don’t always have. You may not have time to do the research for that new 2,000-word article this week. But there’s always time to repurpose some of the old content you have, because you don’t have to always reinvent the wheel.

Save the longer post for later after you’ve had time to think about it. In the meantime, you can easily freshen up a good old piece into something new and exciting. Whereas a 2,000-word post might take you a couple of days to properly research and write, you could probably revise and republish an old post in an hour.

4. It Boosts Your Website’s SEO

If the old piece of content that you are thinking about repurposing hasn’t been optimized or was optimized using a keyword that has a high competition, you can now go ahead and use a long tail keyword for the new piece.

For an SEO boost, you can also repurpose several old articles and find some good keywords that revolve around the same topic.

5. Repetition Is the Mother of All Learning

Some might say that coming up with new content is better than repurposing old content. But there’s a rule in marketing that says this: A potential customer needs to hear or read your message multiple times before he or she decides to buy something.

The conclusion can be that it’s more effective to repurpose content than to write new pieces.

Make Repurposing Old Content a Part of Your Content Marketing Strategy This Year

It’s a fact of marketing that even your best content has a limited shelf life. But you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to have an effective content marketing strategy. Instead, reinvest in your best content.

Give old blog posts new life with updates or a different framing of the same material. Or repurpose that content in a different marketing medium. Save your new cornerstone content for when you have time to properly research and write it. In the meantime, refresh an old piece to save time. And think about using your repurposed content as a brand new opportunity to rank for new SEO keywords.

Finally, remember that your leads and customers need to hear the same messages repeatedly in order to convert. It’s old news to you, but it’s a fresh reminder to your audience to make a purchase.  

See how Kaleidico can help you take your content marketing to the next level, converting more traffic into revenue.