Refreshing old content

Sometimes, new content can be overrated. If you have been producing high-quality content for some time, chances are that you would have already covered a lot of topics that your audience wanted.

Now, there are two options for you:

1. Expand into topics that are less popular or target a slightly different type of audience, or…
2. Refresh old content, update them with new information, and get more out of them.

The second option is almost always more convenient and cost-effective. Often, it can also be more viable.

Identify the best-performing posts on your website that still produce a lot of traffic and leads. Then come up ways on how you can refresh and improve them. Here are a few ideas:

• Update the featured image
• Add more images and videos
• Add infographics to the post, if possible
• Update the post with new information
• Make the post longer, if possible
• Update statistics and links to studies, if there are any

Producing more “evergreen” content

Websites that mainly rely on news-based content must keep going. It’s because trendy topics — although they can produce a good amount of traffic — can get old very quickly.

On the other hand, evergreen content (aka timeless content) has a much longer life. Some evergreen pieces on the internet are still valid after 10 years.

If you want to produce less content, you might want to shift to evergreen posts that have a longer life.

Producing content that is more likely to work

Certain types of content work better than others. For example, a long-form blog post is likely to generate more backlinks than a 300-word blog post. Similarly, infographics are expected to get more backlinks and social shares than a simple text-based blog post. If you want to produce less content with almost the same amount of traffic and leads, you need to identify what content works best for you.

Dive into your Google Analytics account, identify the best-performing pieces, and segment them based on their type. Do your readers prefer long-form blog posts? Do they like infographics? Do they prefer short-form how-to blog posts? Whatever it is, you need to produce more of that, so you don’t have to churn out dozens of content pieces frequently.

Spending more time and effort on content promotion

When you are publishing new content, you need to start focusing more on content promotion.

Many professional bloggers publish only a few dozen blog posts, but they promote each one of them heavily. Brian Dean from Backlink reached 1 million visitors with just 32 blog posts.

So it’s certainly possible to generate a lot of targeted traffic with fewer posts, but it all comes to down to the quality of your content and how effectively and efficiently you promote it.

Recycling content into different formats

Here is another easier way to generate traffic without spending hours and hours on producing new content. Instead of writing new blog posts, recycle the ones you already have into different formats.

For example, if you have a high-performing text-based blog post, you can turn it into a video or an infographic. You can also transcribe popular videos and recycle them into text-based blog posts. The options are only limited to your imagination.

The reason this technique works is that different mediums often work well for different types of people. Moreover, if a piece of content has performed significantly well in one medium, it is also likely to perform well in another one.

Expanding into new languages

Lastly, you can take your existing content and expand it into new languages. The U.S. and U.K. search engine results pages in English have a lot of competition. To compete, you have to create a lot of high-quality content — which takes time and effort.

However, other languages don’t have such a high level of competition. You can take your existing high-performing content and convert it into multiple different languages.

This won’t take a lot of time — not as much as writing on a brand new topic would take — but it will still open new doors in terms of traffic and leads for your business.