How to Get Even More ROI from Your Most Popular Blog Posts

You've created a killer piece of content, optimized it for search engines, shared it across various social networks, and generated a slew of likes, comments and shares. As new posts are being added to your blog regularly, however, your masterpiece has started to slowly fade into oblivion.

So, is there anything you could possibly do to extend its lifetime?

Of course there is. For starters, remember that your content doesn't exist in a vacuum. You work is not done after you hit "publish." Namely, in the era where 2 million blog posts are published every day, promotion is a critical element of your content marketing strategy and you simply cannot afford to mess it up or ignore it.

If you're not investing enough time and effort in the promotion of your popular content, all your chances of survival in the competitive digital marketing landscape are as good as gone. 

With that being said, here are a few strategies you should use to squeeze the most out of the content you create.  

1. Build Valuable Internal Links

Internal linking is simply directing your reader from one page to another within the same domain. The main aim of internal links is to guide your visitors toward the content they are interested in, make content that is not easily accessible from the homepage available to your readers, and pass link juice to the pages with lower authority.

Here are a few golden rules of internal linking to your older posts that you should keep in mind:

• Never link for the sake of linking. You need to do it naturally when you believe that the content you shared before may add value to the new one. Most importantly, make sure your anchor text is descriptive, natural and logical to a reader
• Every time you write a new post, link to a couple of the old ones. When doing so, you need to categorize the topics you've written about and choose the most prominent articles you want to link to regularly. Trust me, this will save you a lot of time.
• Update old articles with new links. When you add new links to your older posts, Google crawlers will see and index them again. Most importantly, you will pass the link juice from your already established page to a new one.

2. Repurpose Your Content

Over the past few years, repurposing content has become a pretty big deal. It helps you breathe new life into your older, but popular content and keep getting value from it in the future.

The benefits of repurposing content are multiple.

First, it can significantly boost your SEO efforts. Numerous forms of content sharing the same topic give you an opportunity to target the most relevant keywords you want to rank for. Plus, if you share this content outside your site, you can earn high-quality backlinks, as well.

Second, you can reach out to a wider audience. Your original piece of content has probably made a splash with one group of your followers. However, by repurposing it for different channels, you might manage to connect with a wider audience.

Third, you will boost your customer engagement. This is especially true in today's era of visual content and augmented reality, where text-based content is not enough anymore. Studies show that two-thirds of users would rather read lavishly designed content than something plain.

Create new blog posts and articles

Relevant content can spin off more relevant content. Let's take this article as an example. It's a list of four tactics that can help you generate higher ROI from your popular posts. So, to repurpose it one day, I could simply break it down to four individual pieces of content, such as "Ways to Boost your Old Content Building Internal Links," "The Importance of Repurposing Content," and so on. This is a great way to drill into a particular subject matter, explain it in detail, add valuable background information, etc.

You could also consider doing the opposite. For instance, you can take a few related articles and merge them into a single guide or a summary post. This is an awesome opportunity for those blogs that create brief 500-word articles to deliver a comprehensive piece of content.

Build an infographic

Did you know that infographics are liked and shared three times more than other social media content? They are a great method of presenting a wide range of complex data and statistics in a more digestible way. Most importantly, if you don't have any graphic design experience, there are various tools like Canva, Piktochart and Visually that can help you create your own infographics effortlessly.

Create a podcast or video series

The majority of your audience prefers content they won't have to read. Studies show that four times as many consumers would prefer to watch a video about a product than to read about it.

In light of statistics like that, videos and podcasts may be one of the most powerful repurposing techniques, opening up a whole new way to connect with your followers. You may consider podcasting a one-way channel of communication, but this doesn't have to be so. Namely, the most effective podcasts use original content as a starting point for a discussion. Also, when explaining something, you can always use your previous blog posts as a reference.

3. Update your Content Regularly

A few years ago, Ahrefs published a post called "200+ Actionable SEO Tips in One Noob Friendly Guide." However, this year, they have shortened this list and left us with only 70 tips.

So, why did they do that?

The answer is simple - they revised the article and realized that it's full of irrelevant or outdated content.

Things change and not every piece of content you create is evergreen. Now you're probably thinking that the blog posts you've shared months or even years ago are buried deep in the depths of your site and that your readers won't find them.

Wrong.

That's where SEO shines. If your post was published a few years ago, but still ranks well in the SERPs for certain keywords, users may stumble upon it when conducting a search.

Here is how to update your blog posts effectively:

• Edit the existing article instead of publishing a new one to prevent potential issues with duplicate content. It is also important to keep your URL the same to maintain the link value and avoid having to deal with redirects.
• Don't forget to keep keywords in the title if you're modifying it.
• Add an editor's note to the bottom of your updated post to ensure transparency. For example, if a lot of people commented on your posts, a reader would be confused to see that these dates don't match the publish date.
• Make the content accurate. This means removing everything irrelevant, updating outdated statistics, replacing old screenshots with newer ones, updating your CTA, checking and replacing links, etc.
• Optimize your meta description to make it catchier and more relevant to the revamped post.

4. Never Stop Promoting your Content

It's not a secret that a lot of your ROI comes from content promotion. But, here is the thing - even if you do a tremendous promotional push for a few weeks, your traffic will soon start to plummet. The saddest thing about all of this is that you probably haven't reached even a fraction of people that are interested in reading your post.

But, there is no rule saying that you cannot promote your older posts. On the contrary, one of the most amazing things about your popular, evergreen content is that you can share it a few months (or even years) later, adding almost the same value as you did for the first time.

Always look at this practice this way - you're not only reminding your loyal followers of the amazing content they've already read, but also expanding your follower base, testing what works for your readers today and boosting their engagement. Research shows that reposting can bring in 75 percent of the engagement of the original share.

• Post on social networks. There are hundreds of social networking platforms, and promoting your posts on all of them would be completely useless. To boost your ROI, you should narrow down your choices and choose a few channels to spread the word about your posts.
• Republish your content on Q&A sites like Quora either by sharing a post or by finding and commenting on users' questions relevant to the topic you had written about.
• Create an email series. You can break your article down into smaller, but logical units and send them as independent emails. Once you have your email series set, you can offer them to your blog followers by asking them to subscribe. This is a great way to drive new subscribers to your blog and generate new revenue streams.
• Post guest articles on authoritative websites and blogs. No matter what Google says, link building is still one of the most powerful ways to drive traffic to your site, especially if you've created quality content to link to. By posting content on relevant sites in your industry, you will not only get great backlinks to your blog post, but also get targeted referral traffic and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

Content Work is Never Done

As you can see, you're not done with a post once you hit the "publish" button. Given the time and effort you invested in creating it, the only way to ensure decent ROI from it is through repurposing it multiple times. So, if you're not using these strategies to make sure your content is rediscovered time and time again, it's time to rethink your strategy.