Spent a few hours this morning looking through all 588 blog posts I’ve published here since I launched this blog in Fall of 2008.
Wow. 588 posts. That’s probably around 176,500 total words assuming an average of 300 words per post. But more importantly, that’s a lot of content that for the moment, is sitting around dormant and underutilized.
What to do?
Here are five things one can do with old blog content:
1. Update the posts. There is a post I published in January 2009 that is my most-viewed post. And I hate it. It wasn’t as well-written as I would like, and my opinions have changed on the subject matter somewhat since then. So, I’ve made some plans to do some minor modification on the post itself. I will update the text to a small degree, add a picture, add links to more current and related content, plus add an invitation to sign-up to my mailing list, which did not exist back then.
2. e-books. After my exercise this morning, I have four e-books that are now content-ready. They just need to be edited and packaged. This is the immediate next step for me. But if you’ve blogged for a while, and have content organized into categories, you probably have some e-books in there. All you’ve got to do is carve it out of stone…
3. e-newsletters. Just this morning, I identified 18 older posts that I will repurpose and insert into an existing autoresponder program I am running. These were 18 articles that I loved writing, were proud of, were well-received at the time, but probably haven’t been read in over a year (or more). Time to get some function and use out of year(s) old content!
4. Repurpose old content into current guest posts. If someone invites you to guest post on their site, and you should usually accept offers to do that since it is a great way to expose you and your writing to a new audience, you can repurpose old content from your blog. You don’t necessarily have to write new material…
5. Print book. The list of bloggers who turned blog content into published print books (traditional and self-published) is growing longer by the day.
If you have blogged for a while, just remember this: there is gold in them hills. And you have lots of options on what to do with that old content. Get creative with it, and see your old content come back to life!
Plus, any other ideas?
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[drawing by hugh macleod]
