Republished Content: Making Old Words New Again

Content is king. That has been drummed into writers and anyone contemplating social media marketing for years. You need to constantly create quality content to engage your readers.

Is that entirely true though? Yes and no.

As of late, I have been reminded that I have plenty of fodder in my archives to potentially revisit. I have been blogging since 2009 on various sites. That amounts to thousands of posts I could republish, many of which may not have been seen by present audiences. While it might not be new to me, it is new to someone who has never seen it before. And as such, it just might be worthy of being republished.

Republished Content

Before you republish old articles, there are a few things to consider.

When contemplating using republished content, check for;

• broken links – linking to other websites is good practice, but not if the links are broken. Before republishing a blog article, make sure your links are still active and link to the correct content.
• dated images – sometimes a picture that was good enough back then, no longer fits the bill now. Consider updating images to freshen up the post.
• missing images – if the original picture was taken down from a site you shared it from, you might find a broken image in your archives. Using your own images prevents this, but barring that, a fresh image may be necessary.
• featured images – if you do change images, make sure that your feature image is updated accordingly too.
• changes in viewpoint – our ideas and viewpoints are constantly changing. You might want to make sure you still believe the views you are expressing before you republish old content.
• changes in formatting – updates to websites offer a fresh new look. Sometimes that affects how previously published articles look though. Before republishing content, make sure the format still works for your platform.
• new styles in formatting – beyond the behind the scenes formatting, you might also come across changes to styles of writing and presenting content. It doesn’t hurt updating the style of your article before your republish your content.
• quality of post – the more you write, the better a writer you become. Hence, it makes sense that sometimes old content is no loner worth sharing. It doesn’t hurt to delete old posts that aren’t up to present standards, or at the very least sliding them out of published status to give them a thorough going over before you republish them.

One last thing to consider. If you are making changes to a post, don’t forget about your URL. The URL is the slug in the top search bar which people (and bots) use to find your specific article. If you change it, the article may be harder to find. Consider leaving it the same, even if the post title changes. That way if anyone has linked to your article, those links still remain valid (not broken!).

Republishing old content is a great idea. It gets your words in front of a new and potentially wider audience. It saves you time writing new posts. Readers can revisit old articles they might not remember. And it just might inspire new words in the future. It helped inspire this post for me today!

Do you ever republish old content? Have you gone back and edited/updated old posts?