If you’ve been blogging for a while, might I suggest you take the time to revisit some older posts to see if they can be updated and revised. In an ideal world, every one of our posts would be perfect, but let’s face it, we don’t live in an ideal world.

The information we used may be dated, there might be some wrong info in it or you’ve become  more of an expert on the subject. And if we’re honest with ourselves, some of our posts weren’t our best efforts.  Even changing a post title can dramatically increase traffic to a post.

All good reasons to rework, revise and update.

Here are 5 suggestions on how you might improve and update a post:

1. Post Title. This by far is the most important. If the title doesn’t get them hooked, you could be giving away a million dollars in the copy and they wouldn’t even see it.
2. Opening Paragraph. We need to remember that when writing blogs it’s different than writing ad or sell sheet copy. You need to answer the question (WIIFM) what’s in it for me. If the reader gets a sense upfront of what the post is about, you have a good chance of keeping them engaged. Newspaper writers are good examples; they lead with a strong headline, give the highlights in the first paragraph and then deliver the details. Go ahead and be a Clark Kent and you’ll see that you might turn into Superman!
3. Add more meat. Since your last post, either the industry has changed or you’ve become smarter, so put more meat on the bones.
4. Add more depth. Spend a few more minutes giving examples, sharing opinions or suggesting a book.
5. Call to action. After all, isn’t one of the purposes of a blog is to engage our readers? Ask a question, direct them to another site or give them some sort of next step.

I’m sure you could think of other steps as well. Darren Rowse has an interesting post, Updating old posts on your blog, that might be of interest to you .

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 7:07 am and is filed under Marketing Tips, Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.