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Should you delete or re-purpose your existing content?

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Should you delete old content or re-purpose it?

Should you delete old content or re-purpose it?

You have been publishing content for years, right? By now you must have a couple of thousand blog posts and web pages. Some of the web pages and blog posts on my blog are from 2008-2010. Some of the information is evergreen. For example, some writing tips that I have shared can be used even now. I have little time sensitive content.

Read: The difference between content repurposing and content spinning

Should you delete or re-purpose your old content, is the question asked by this CMSWire blog post.

If you are not a professional content writer yourself and you also don’t write by yourself, you must have spent money on your content. Your existing content is the asset you have invested in.

Right now, the five-year-old content may look outdated and stale but when you published it you paid good money for it and it was quite up-to-date. You were proud of it.

Of course, if your business direction has changed than the old content solves no purpose if it was written for your old direction. It is irrelevant content. Its time has passed. Even if it is drawing traffic, it isn’t benefiting you. If you want, you can remove the content from your website. You can even request Google to remove it.

Other than that, I always advise my clients to re-purpose content. You can rewrite it. If the old information is relevant, you can update it. From a subsection you can write a completely new blog post. If you think the language of the blog post or the web page doesn’t truly represent your brand correctly now, you can update that.

Being a content writer, I am possessive about what I create. Since for the past 15 years more or less I have been providing the same services, nothing much has changed. Maybe a few sentences here and there, but other than that, with little revisions, I can easily update my old content. You should do the same if your content is not completely irrelevant.

The effectiveness of content marketing can be measured in terms of before and after

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Measuring effectiveness of content marketing strategyIt is not often possible to understand exactly how content is impacting your bottom line: are you doing more business due to your content marketing effort?  There is no hard and fast rule and it is extremely difficult to track individual pages and blog posts and then make out how much business they are bringing in.  So how do you rationalize the implementation of the content marketing strategy or how do you monitor its effect?

There is one established fact that content marketing works; what you have to find out is  whether it is working for you or not.  Content marketing is not like a traditional marketing campaign where you just create an ad and then use TV, newspapers and magazines, and websites to disseminate that ad and then analyze various metrics.  This doesn’t work in the case of content marketing.  More than a push marketing it is a pull marketing and it spreads over the long span of time and effort.

So you can have a before  and after scenario that is working for many people with tremendous results.  What was your overall revenue before you implemented your content marketing strategy, or what is your current revenue when you are just about to implement content strategy.  Is there a change, say, during the past four months, ever since you have been paying close attention to your content marketing strategy? This change, if it is there, becomes your metrics that you can use to gauge the success or failure of a particular content marketing plan.

This works in conjunction with shorter, more focused plans.  Take for instance user engagement.  You know you can increase your sales by encouraging use of engagement on your website/blog and also on your social media profiles.   You also know that up till now nothing much has happened.  For user engagement you need engaging content.  So focus on this.  Try to come up with content that encourages your visitors to engage in conversations with you. What drives them? What motivates them?  What excites them?

Not getting enough traffic?  It must be an SEO issue but it may also be due to the fact that you don’t have the right kind of content.  Even if you feel you have got tons of content are you focusing on the right keywords?  Even if you feel that you are focusing on the right keywords are you really covering the keywords that your target customers and clients use?

These are smaller issues (not smaller on their own but in terms of the end result: increasing your revenue) and you can begin with them so that you can measure the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy.  When you see more and more people coming to your website and when you see that they are engaging in conversations with you and among each other (talking about your business, or at least its object/topic related to your business) you know that you have an effective content marketing strategy working for you.