Digging the past: Leveraging Old Content For New Content Ideas

Posted by Tejas Kirodiwal

September 17, 2013

Content Marketing 12 min read

Coming up with new ideas is something that the bloggers are challenged with constantly. There are times when a writer is completely stuck, short of ideas. In search of ideas through a number of sources, writers tend to forget more often that the treasure lies within. Yes, the treasure is in the form of old content. You might not believe, but revisiting old content can bring up a series of new ideas.

Digging the past

Same post with a Difference

As a writer, one of the pre-requisites is constant evolution. If you are re-writing an old post, it will be completely different than what you wrote the last time. This is because you have evolved as a writer. Try this – find your old past, write the title and start writing whatever comes to your mind. You will be taken by surprise to see that it is totally different than your previous post.

Popularity of the Older Posts

Looking at the old posts, you will be able to find out some of the most popular of your posts. They may have received a lot of comments and likes. Figure out what the post was all about. What made it so popular? Was it a hot topic? If yes, chances are that people will like the same topic again. Present the same topic with a new perspective. If required, you could also state all the changes that have taken place in the current scenario. You could refer the old post in the new one and provide a link for it.

Use your reference file

A consistent collecion of incomplete ideas and all your creations in a reference file could prove to be a foundation for some of your best works. You could have a single document, wherein you could save all the ideas, new words, phrases, titles, software features and updates, structure of an article, and various other things. There is no need to organize it, but you could keep a track of all the random ideas, so that you could get back to them in case you forget them. Some of them could be very old ideas. Going back to these old ideas could help you get those in sync with the current updates.

Expand your own ideas

Expand ideas

Let’s suppose that you had written plenty of articles in the past year. A lot of updates might have taken place in that particular area on which you have written the content. There could be lists that you would have given on a particular process. So, if you had given 10 steps to produce a mind-blowing content, you could expand that particular post and increase the count of steps to 15 or even 20.

New People Reading

One more reason why you should consider digging your old content, is for the new readers. Many of them might not have visited your site earlier, so for them your old idea is a new idea. Present the new ideas for your new readers in a new manner. Do not re-write the same post. Modify it and add some of the updates that have taken place pertaining to that topic.

Conclusion:

It isn’t necessary to research you old content for new ideas. You could also look at other blog posts of the same topic. Have a look at their posts and also find out those which were like and commented on the most. I am not advocating that you could copy their posts. In fact, get inspired to write something new. Even content curation is bound to work big time as long as you are not re-writing the same posts.

Categories

Let's Talk