Bad Content Weighing You Down? Here’s How to Fix It.

Over the last several years, you’ve doubtless heard plenty about content marketing—the idea that original blog, video, podcast, and social media content can engage users and qualify leads. Content marketing can certainly be effective, but of course that’s contingent on your content being high-quality. (Ah, there’s the rub!) If you’ve been developing and distributing content but not seeing any positive results from it, there may be a simple explanation: It may be that your content just isn’t as strong or as well-optimized as you’d thought.

But here’s the good news: Even content that falls flat can be revised and revitalized. Consider these strategies for giving your older content a second lease on life.

Revitalizing Your Old Content

Change the meta data. Both the meta description and the SEO title are important to any piece of content, as they determine what will be displayed on the Google search engine results page. If your content hasn’t been getting much SEO traction, it may simply be that you need to revisit your title and meta description and make them more compelling.

Revising outdated posts. There is such a thing as evergreen content—that is, content that’s written to be timeless—but there is also content with a set expiration date. If your content is filled with dated information or older facts and figures, you may simply need to refresh it in order to make it more modern.

Cleaning up your links. Never underestimate the importance of links within your content. If you’ve written a blog post that doesn’t have internal or external links to support it, go back and add some. Meanwhile, if your older content is filled with broken or outdated links, clean them up.

Enrich your content. The written word is seldom sufficient for engaging your readers. Your written content should always be augmented with graphics or video. If you have a bunch of old, image-free posts, try to spruce them up with some engaging imagery.

Promote your content in new ways. Share your post on Twitter. Publish it on LinkedIn Pulse. Send it out in an e-mail. Create new ways for people to connect and discover!

Do a quality check. When all else fails, consider the possibility that perhaps the post just isn’t all that great. Read through it again. Proof it well. Correct grammatical errors. Rewrite or just remove anything that’s boring or lacks value. Remember that good content should always provide the reader with actionable takeaways—with real solutions to actual problems.

Hopefully you’ll find these tips to be helpful; in the meantime, check out some of the marketing resources on offer at ACES!