Do you sometimes struggle to come up with a new topic for your blog? Are you searching for more ideas for compelling articles on your website’s news page? If you don’t have news to report, an event to promote, or something specific you want to get across to your readers, why not take a look in your archives and revisit a solid evergreen article or blog post, giving it some new content to increase engagement with your audience>?
Revamping old material isn’t about sifting through old news and reusing it so you don’t have to write something new. In fact, it could take more time to tweak a post than to write a new one. Revamping gives you the opportunity to revisit a topic with a fresh perspective or add context to current news.
You can fix errors, tweak sentences and update information. You can use it for background information to address a related current topic. If you have an effective blog or website with analytics that show the most popular content among readers, you can generate more (and new!) readership by going back to that content and revitalizing it. What can you add to your already rich content? How can you engage readers even more than you did the first time?
A recent article by Patrick deHahn of Associations Now highlighted an industrious strategy that news startup Vox adopted in December to update and fine-tune evergreen pieces, which drew nearly half a million readers to its website in a five-day period:
The news site Vox plays around with its older published posts and offers up some useful lessons in the process. Plus: Build an effective marketing presence, even without a huge budget.
The young news startup Vox has already put the hard work into explaining the news.
Its newest goal? “Refreshing the evergreen.”
Since launch, the website has relied on a series of card stacks that answer basic questions on larger news topics and has updated those throughout the year, when needed.
But back in December, Vox tried the same basic idea, except on steroids: It looked at older stories, figured out which of the evergreen pieces were due for an update, and fine tuned the articles. Headlines were changed, facts were corrected, and newer information was inserted.
The results were impressive.
