by: AskPat 386 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, everybody. What's up? This is Pat Flynn and welcome to Episode 386 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your on-line business related questions, five days a week.
All right, here's today's question from Jimm.
Jimm: Hey Pat, Jimm Walsh here. I have a firefighter training website located over at over at VentEnterSearch.com. The website has been around for over nine years. There are hundreds of posts with some amazing content. So my question is this, how do I best utilize or repurpose this older content? I know I have some readers that have been with me from the very beginning and I know I have some people that are finding the site for the first time each and every day. I just want to make sure that I maximize the current content that I already have in addition to continuing to add new content. Thanks so much for everything you're doing with SPI and Ask Pat. You're pushing out some quality content and it's really making a difference. Thanks.
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, Jimm? Thank you so much for this question. I really appreciate it because a lot of times we write so much great content, so much, and so quickly, relatively speaking, that a lot of that great content gets hidden, or just gets lost over time. As we grow our blogs, especially if you've grown yours from nine years straight, a lot of that stuff that you've written years ago, which I'm sure is still relevant, completely evergreen and amazing, just gets lost. Especially like you said, because there's a lot of new people coming to our sites who might not be able to find them. So I have for you eight different things you can do. Eight different things that you can do to resurface some of that old content and have them be viewed again as if they were brand new. So, here are those ideas.
The first idea is one that comes to mind that I have on my site that in the new redesign will probably be more prevalent but is actually at the footer of SmartPassiveIncome.com, and that is a best of page. So, if you scroll down to the bottom of SmartPassiveIncome.com you'll notice a link that says, “Best Of,” and it takes and breaks down the categories of Smart Passive Income or the major categories at least, and then provides four to six links for each of those things that … It varies, but I pick out the best content of each of those types of content categories and I link to them there. A lot of times I'll talk about this Best Of page, I'll share this Best Of page on social media, I'll link to it in blog posts, I'll talk about it in emails and conversations on a podcast episode and it becomes a great way to become a hub for a lot of the best stuff that I've already written in the past that will often get hidden and lost over time. So the Best Of page is idea number one.
Idea number two is a Getting Started page. So, it's similar in a way where you have content that's from the past that's brought back to people who are coming to your site, but this isn't the Best Of page. The Best Of is a lot of times for people who, not just are brand new to your site, but are old school on your site who want to just go to one particular place where all the best stuff is on the surface there, so that's the best of page.
The Getting Started page is strictly there for people who are getting started. This is your beginner content. This is going to break down your site into different categories, but more so keeping the fact that the people who are going to be visiting this particular page, again the Getting Started page, which is one of my most visited pages on SmartPassiveIncome.com, one of my most profitable, as well in terms of the subscribers and also the income I get from particular things that I recommend on that page. That's going to be for beginners and that's going to list some of their first steps. So, where do they start? It might even just have one or two links on it but those are important things, especially those are probably things you've already written in the past that you don't want to just keep re-writing over and over and over and over again for people. Have it in a particular place where people that are brand new to the site can feel comfortable going, saying, “Oh, well this is a section for me because I'm here for the first time.” And then they can go find those older posts from there. So, that's number two.
Number three is a Resource page. So this is for everybody, in particular a page that has a list of resources that are mentioned on your website. This could be a list of products that you've mentioned, courses that you have, books that you've recommended, but also really high quality evergreen blog posts that you've written in the past. I do this, for example, I have the “Backlinking Strategy That Works in 2014 and Beyond” on there, I have the Podcasting Tutorial that I've created on there, as well. Again, these are blog posts, but they are high quality blog posts that could essentially become their own product if they wanted to be put on that page on a resource for people. And I again, just like the best of page, I mention the resource page quite often on the podcast, on the blog, I link to it all the time, it's linked to in the sidebar and the navigation bar, and people find that older content right there on that page. So, that's number three.
Number four for you, and this should seem obvious, but it could be a little bit difficult to organize. Now, you can listen to Episode 383 of AskPat with Dana, who asked about organization, but I talk a little bit about using a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet is a great thing for you to organize your blog posts, and you might have to go back into time, Jimm, and go through all your blog posts and start to create a spreadsheet that actually lists all your blog posts, all the different categories, all the different keywords that you use for them, and the cool thing about this is you can use that spreadsheet.
If you have, for example, all those 900 posts in there, if you're writing about a particular topic you can go back, sort this particular spreadsheet with all of your previous blog posts on it and see what else you've written about that particular topic and that will make it really easy for you to pull out those old blog posts that you've likely forgotten about that nobody has ever seen before and link to them in those new blog posts that you're writing about that same particular topic. You'll want to link to older, relevant posts, but the spreadsheet idea will help make that happen much easier without you having to think too hard and remember on the fly, well, “What did I write in the past 700 posts ago that could be linked to here?” The interlinking in that way is going to be very important. Google looks at that. That's why Wikipedia ranks so well because they link to relevant content within their site extremely well. So that's idea number four.
Idea number five, you can resurface a popular topic. Essentially, take a topic that you've written about a long time ago and write about it again. Now, you don't want to copy paste a topic that you've written before but you could say even at the top of that blog post, the last time I talked about this was in 2009, here's that old post, and I want to resurface this because this is really important, and this is how it has changed today, or is this is what you need to think about it in today's world. That's a great way to do it. So resurface old popular blog posts. In order to know what's most popular you could look at the comments, but also you could look at your analytics to see what were some of the big topics back in 2008, for example, and you could pull those back in 2015.
Okay, next, number six I believe, is include links to your older posts in your email autoresponder series. So when people subscribe, they get links coming in or valuable content getting posted to their email inbox and then you can have links to some of your older posts in there, as well.
Number seven, social media. Social media is obviously a great thing to do. I've been doing this more so recently, pulling out a lot of my older posts, high quality ones that obviously people enjoyed and have become evergreen and I have scheduled them in tools like Edgar to be able to … You can find that at MeetEdgar.com which allows me to schedule blog posts, or excuse me, schedule tweets and Facebook posts ahead of time, but also create a library of posts that will be recycled so they don't get wasted. I, for example, have four to five older blog posts that I've scheduled in the library and I have certain days of the week where those posts get pushed out and that helps people find some of my older content.
And then number eight, finally, if you have a podcast, Jimm, you could bring some of those older posts, and resurface them in a podcast. You could bring on a guest to debate with you on those particular items. You can go back into time. For example, maybe you have a success story that you want to share that was based on an article that somebody had read a long time ago, or maybe you've written an article a long time ago about somebody who was just joining up with you, or somebody going through a particular struggle, and then you bring them on your podcast episode, resurface that particular blog post, you could link to it in the show notes and then also bring that person on to be a follow up and then you can actually link to that newer podcast in your older blog post to have interlinking both ways.
Jimm, hopefully that helps you and gives you a few ideas on you can repurpose your existing content in addition to the new content that you're creating. Sounds like everything is going great. I wish you all the best of luck and thank you for what you do if you are fire fighter, and for everybody out there who does that kind of stuff, puts their life on the line, thank you so much for what you do to help all the rest of us stay safe. Thank you, I really appreciate it. And Jimm, you're going to hear from my assistant in the next couple weeks to collect your information so we can send you an AskPat t-shirt. If you have a second to take a picture with it and send it over. Even if you don't want to include your face in it, it's just cool to see these AskPat t-shirts in the wild. You can send that to me even via Twitter @PatFlynn or via email, whatever. Thank you so much again, Jimm.
And for those of you who are listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here in the show, just head on over to AskPat.com, you can ask right there on that page. Just click the record button, record your question, and it will be sent over our way and it can get on the show just like Jimm did.
All right, and here's a quote from Janet Fitch to finish off today, and that is, “The Phoenix must burn to emerge.” Love that, especially because I'm reading Harry Potter to my kids right now. “the phoenix must burn to emerge.” Thanks Janet Fitch for that quote, and thank you all for listening today. I appreciate you. Cheers, take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.