Welcome to episode 320 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris.
All right, so recently we talked about repurposing content and recycling content for social media. Today I want to talk about actually breathing life into the content that’s on your website. Finding new ways to drive traffic to it or just straight up reviving it, updating it, repurposing it. That’s what we’re going to talk about today because your value continues to be valuable. I want to make sure that you are getting every last drop of value for your own business out of the value you’re providing your community because the struggle is real when it comes to creating content.
As you may know, if you’ve listened to this show for a while, I’m actually recording this at the very beginning of November and this will go live at the very end of November and I am in … This week has been back to back to back to back recording days where I’m recording 4, 5, 6 episodes a day of the podcast. That just reminds me how important it is for me to literally get all the use out of the stuff that I create, because as much fun as it is for me to create this content, the real fun is when you guys use the content and you get value from it and you see results from it and it works for you, whatever that is in that episode.
I got to find as many ways as possible to get it in front of you, so that’s really what breathing life back into your content is all about. We’re going to talk about 2 ways to do this. We’re going to talk about updating your content, and we’re going to talk about repurposing your content. Both of these are parts and options when it comes to knowing that your content can get seen again, can be valuable again, and can really help website traffic and things like that. Cool? Cool.
Let’s start with updating.
Depending on the way you put your content out, updating can actually look like a couple of things. Let’s start with just the bare bones simplest. Let’s start with blog posts. Written blog post, the best way to update it is to go in and just update it. Change any links that might be broken. Change any facts that may have changed. A great example of this is if you are somebody who like me who is in the social media space, things like Facebook measurements, graphic measurements, or tools you’re using, or things like that. That stuff can get outdated because I’m discovering new things, networks are making changes, new things are coming out all of the time. That information evolves quite frequently and so that’s going to be your simplest thing. Go in and just straight update the facts, update links and thinks like that. The next way to update might be to add to it. Maybe you have learned something else. Maybe you found another tip. You can always just add a couple of sentences. Change one of the points, update one of the points, give one of the points more priority than you did. You really are just going to go in an straight update the text.
Now when it comes to updating something like a podcast or a video series, it can be a little trickier because you now have media that you have go and edit and things like that, but there’s still a way. Really, the best way you can do it is to update the text that’s on the page that is alongside your video or alongside you’re audio. We’re doing this right now by going through and adding transcripts to the show notes. For the last, maybe 40 episodes, we’ve done transcripts with every episode, but we are just starting to go back and work through some of our most popular episodes and give an update to those show notes by adding a transcript of the show.
Again, this is great from an SEO perspective because we’re adding more keywords, but also it’s great from and SEO perspective because now all of that look like new content. In addition to that as it gets seen again, it’s got more value, it’s got new value and there’s going to be people who are a fan of listening to that episode and who want to use it as a resource. That was actually one of the biggest requests I got from people when they ask for transcripts, it was really about, “Hey, these are great but I wish I had a reference so I can bookmark something or highlight something. I didn’t have to listen to the episode to find one point you made.” That’s a big part of the reason the transcripts exist.
That’s why going back and adding those back in the past episodes is going to be such a valuable way to update it. Again, there’s SEO value for me, there is incredible value for the audience in that fact that it’s a new way to consume that content. Also there are people who are starting to find my site who don’t particularly want to listen to me, which is fine, and if you’re one of them, you’re totally reading this and hello. Now you don’t have to listen to me. You can skim a podcast and find the points you need instead of listening to me with all of my charm and wonder. For those of you who are listening, thank you.
That’s a really valuable thing I can add as far as updating and breathing new life into the first, I think we started at 280, so the first 279 episodes of the show. The other way we can do that with video is again, add transcripts but also updating our resources, updating those links, updating the information that we added in the resource section a lot like we do when we update a blog post, making sure those links still work. That’s probably one of the biggest things that I’m probably really terrible at doing, which is going through and checking our broken links and making sure that those links that are on past show notes episodes are still working because we have had guests on the show in the first year or so whose websites aren’t around anymore because they’ve changed their domains or they’ve gone out of business or whatever. That’s an important thing to factor in.
Once we have updated them, how can we drive more traffic? Well A, you can do things like recycle your content, which I’ll leave a link in the resource section on the show notes page over at The Stacey Harris to the episode we talked about recycling social media content. We’re driving traffic to old episodes of this show all the time, especially through Twitter and LinkedIn and Google+, which yes, I still use Google+, I just don’t actually use it from a social perspective, just as a broadcast tool, but that’s a whole other episode.
I can continue to drive traffic to that. On the flipside, I can do other things. I can, for example, take these transcripts that I have from my episodes, write guest posts using that transcript and then use that to drive traffic back to the original podcast episode. That’s right, I’m now using this to drive traffic as well as build my credibility and expose myself to a new audience. Even as I was saying that, it felt wrong, but you know what I’m saying. Getting in front of new people, showcasing what we do here on this show to a group of people who maybe haven’t heard the show yet. That’s a really powerful way to repurpose content and ideas and value I’ve already created.
The same can be done with a blog post. Take a section of that blog post, maybe build off of it a little bit, tweak it, make it a guest post, and you just have to drive traffic back to your blog post. You can do that on a lot of sites but I think the simplest, the lowest barrier to entry, start using the LinkedIn publisher platform to do that. You can build it right there on LinkedIn, it goes out, your connections all get a notification and voila, you’re not driving traffic back to your site using value you created a while ago in some cases. That’s a really powerful way to repurpose your content.
On the flipside, if there’s one way you have created it already, create it in another way. For a long time, in addition this show, we also had Hit the Mic TV which was a video show we did on YouTube and a lot of those episodes were parts of things we talked about here on the podcast because it was a smaller show. We kept it under 10 minutes, usually. I think most of time it came under 5 minutes. A lot of times it would be a smaller idea or a piece of something we talked about here on the podcast. Again, I wasn’t reinventing the wheel, I was just creating the same value in a different medium so it could connect with a different group of people, just like when I used the transcripts to create guest posts, maybe that don’t link back to the podcast page.
I’m still using that same value to connect to an audience in a different way. Now we’re doing it through a written blog post instead of a podcast, but guess what? The value point, the connection, the content is quite often the same, it’s just a matter of saying hey, this is the value in a way that you prefer to consume it. This is a way you can connect with someone where maybe the don’t already know you exist or maybe they don’t like podcasts or maybe they prefer not to read blog posts or whatever it is for them and for you. Really look at ways you can take that same value you’ve already created and use it in a new way on a new site. That’s really what it comes down to when it comes down to how to breathe life into content that maybe hasn’t seen the light of internet days in a while.
Okay, so update it and repurpose it. That is the way to go. Of course head over to the show notes page, TheStaceyHarris.com is where you’ll find it and check out the link to recycling social media content because that’s a great way to continue to drive traffic to these old posts through social. I will see you guys on Friday.
Resources
3 Things You Must Know About Maximizing Your Content
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