“Content isn’t King, it’s the Kingdom.”
– Lee Odden

We all want traffic to our blogs, reach out to the people looking for the right information by creating unique content for the niche. But curating new content all the time overshadows the old content which has previously received ample traffic and has been a top performing content for a long time. 

With such rich content already in your bucket, it is a waste to let it be idle. This content is evergreen in nature – it will shed its old leaves, but will make way for new ones to grow. Overall, the content will remain fresh throughout the life-cycle by adapting to trends with time.

The old content needs to be revamped and republished, to garner more conversions, reaching out to the newer audience in a different way. 

Why the need to refurbish content?

• Hold on to existing traffic with old content
  It is very common for visitors to stumble upon your really old post which is doing well in google search ranks or by a reference in another blog. Google search results not necessarily will have fresh and relevant content for specific niche long tail keywords. But it is not long before some other blog would steal your traffic – this is a risk one cannot afford to lose.
• Increase visibility & traffic for old content
  Not all present audience has seen your old content as it is buried under the mountain of new content. By updating the high performance posts, the old content life can be increased by sharing with the current new audience.

Follow 3 steps to refurbishing your top content!

1. Discern your site’s top traffic pages
The idea is to identify the content that have good engagement, getting more traffic and converting the highest. Here, analytics helps to decipher the same. Over the period of time from opsting the content, with better data analytics makes it easier to choose which can work well with the current trends and can be reused. Your top content could be in any form of representation. It is not necessary to refurbish the content again the same way. There are other forms to represent the same content. 

2. Simplify and Repurpose
Let us consider an example – the idea is to talk about paywalls, its types and how can one use it at its strength. If it is written in the form of a long blog, it can be simplified and presented in various ways. It could take shape in the form of a short video. With the current trend, convert it into a crisp podcast. To make it formal, even a presentation or prezi where the information is given out creatively could work well. This makes it more interesting for the audience and thus, gaining higher engagement. The whole idea is to simplify the content and experiment with various mediums of presentation. 
Even adding more content to the existing blog could make the content rich enough. The idea is to learn more about your audience and then pick the right medium in which your audience would  consume the content. 

3. Publish on popular platforms
There are 2 major reasons to take complete advantage of this – one, these platforms are extremely robust in nature with high ranking. And two, these platforms have a massive audience to reach out to. There are people out there looking for content that is relevant to them and you can provide them with what they want. If you fail to reach out, some other competitor will steal away your thunder, which is not what you would want.

For powerpoints, it can be uploaded on Slideshare, which ranks very well. SlideShare is one of the most amazing social networking platforms with 70 million visitors. For a video, before going on Youtube, Vimeo and Wistia are preferable. This is allow you to rank your video better than youtube and also gets you the authority of the video. This can then be transferred to Youtube after some period of time to reach out to more audience. 

Podcast domain is booming crazy. With 100 million+ podcast listeners in the U.S., all podcasters have to start by choosing their podcast hosting provider of choice. SoundCloud, Buzzsprout, PodBean are some of the top podcast platforms to choose from. 

4. Measure the Impact
The crux is to measure the impact of the refurbished and republished content. Analytics is the key to measure the same. The engagement metrics to keep a watch on are number of viewed pages, the amount of time spent on the site, bounce rate is a must look out for, and last but not the least, number of conversions. Also, one of the crucial aspect is to check where there site traffic and where is the lead conversion is coming from.

Add Ons that you can also think of

• While creating an authority content, there are steps to be followed to meet the desired objective. Find out the required resources and helpful tools, create a list of them at the end of the content for the benefit of your audience.
• To give more insight in your content to your audience, it makes complete sense to incorporate as many relevant internal links as possible to some other relevant content on your website.
• Your content may contain 404 redundant links pointing to other web pages which are no longer active, also called broken links. So if a site has too many broken links they can actually be penalized by Google. Use Dead link checker tool to find 404 redundant links across your content. 
• The writing style that you used back then, might not necessarily work while you repost it now. Changing the tone of the post as per your present audience sensibilities. With time we have shifted to a very narrative and user engaged tone. It’s a win-win for us and for our readers.

To sum up in concise, the key help publishers keep their content channels flowing with relevant content is the COPE method – Create Once, Publish Everywhere. Rather than build every asset from scratch, plan in advance to repurpose, reconstruct, and reposition your best content ideas to get the most out of them. If executed thoughtfully, COPE can help publishers to satisfy their audience’s increasingly voracious appetite for quality content without overextending their team’s efforts.

As Christoph Trappe, one of the top 25 content marketers and a storyteller, has said,
“It’s really as simple as writing and producing content that people want to consume. The numbers will tell you what content that is.”