Use Your Old Posts to Create New Content

Written by Deborah Ng from Freelance Writing Jobs on November 4, 2007

A couple of days ago, Chris Garrett asked if we should edit or delete old posts. It reminded me I needed to do a little blog maintenance and review old posts, check links and make sure everything is still relevant. Will I edit or delete old posts? Well, it depends. Since one of my blogs, Freelance Writing Jobs, lists leads to gigs, I deleted those that were months or years old when I switched from Blogger to Wordpress several months ago. It only made sense to do a bit of pruning in that area, I mean, why have lists of dead links?

Would I delete or edit old content? Nope. I use it to make new content. Instead of updating the post, I create new content directing my readers to the older post while explaining why I’m changing my way of thinking. This serves two purposes. The older articles are kept on hand as sort of a historical archive and the newer posts continue to inform, while showing how things change over the years. More content, more pageviews.

The person who helped me make the switch and redesign for my blog, did leave many articles out and one of my missions is to put them back in again. While a lot of my older writing makes me cringe, I think it’s important to look back, see where we were, how we changed, and what we can do better in the future.

Written by Deborah Ng from Freelance Writing Jobs on November 4, 2007 | Filed Under Blogging, Writing

3 Responses so far | Have Your Say!

Chris Vincent | November 4th, 2007 at 3:20 pm #

I’ve thought now and then that the appropriate thing to do was to add a few bold edit paragraphs and then re-release the page so that the whole article was in one place and it would just seem like a very large article that kept on getting interesting because of the updates at the end.
A Blog about Nothing | November 4th, 2007 at 10:12 pm #

What do you consider to be “old” content? Is it an age thing (2, 3, 4… months) or more of an attitude when your thinking changes in a major way from what you posted it become old?

I wonder because I have some content a few months old that I no longer believe to be valid as my views have changed as well as content of the same age I still agree with, but wouldn’t mind pointing folks to take another look at. Especially since I now sport many more readers than I did back then.