How to Recycle Old Content to Increase Your Conversions

I’ve been blogging for more than ten years now, and I thoroughly enjoy the process. However, one thing that I dislike about blogging (especially if you blog a lot) is how easy it is to neglect your old content.

Imagine this: You spend hours and days researching the topic and writing an article to never come back to it after a year or two of active blogging. Only a couple of my articles from all those 10 years of writing keep coming back to me (they are still being referenced by others, and I get reminded of them through monitoring my name and seeing blog trackbacks). Most of my content goes down into the blog archives, and I seldom or never go back to look at it again.

And most bloggers I know are like that. They are more focused on finding new topics and writing a new article than analyzing if they’re doing their best to utilize what they wrote in the past. And it’s a real shame: That content you wrote a few years ago is a huge asset. It has already accumulated some authority through backlinks coming over the years, and it may be getting some clicks too. You may be one step away from seeing a solid boost in traffic coming its way. Or you may be losing conversions because that older content doesn’t have your up-to-date calls-to-action.

In either case, make old content optimization part of your monthly (or at least quarterly) blogging routine—that can boost your conversions without you having to write a brand-new article. Here are a couple of ideas.

Make old content optimization part of your monthly (or at least quarterly) blogging routine.
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1. Brainstorm Ways to Generate More Conversions for Your Best-Performing Old Content

Have you checked your most successful content recently? You probably have, but here’s a quick reminder: Do it! And if you use Google Analytics, it’s very easy! Go:

 Behavior > Site Content > Landing pages

Select “Source/Medium” as a secondary dimension, and increase the number of rows to at least 100 to get a better picture.

From there, brainstorm the best way to optimize your best-performing content for more leads not to lose that traffic.

The secondary dimension will help you come up with the most suitable conversion optimization option. For example, if you see [organic traffic] as the referral traffic for a particular landing page, you may want to add your primarily call-to-action (search traffic converts well in most cases). If you see that StumbleUpon sends clicks to one of your blog posts, your safe bet is to assume those are lurkers, so give them the easiest CTA you can come up (e.g. one-click email sign up, Facebook page like, etc.)

Here are a few more ideas.

Use Your High-Ranking Content to Drive More Clicks to Your Landing Page

The easiest way to optimize your well-performing old content is to add an easy-to-notice in-content link to your main landing page. This will also improve rankings of your important money page because internal linking helps pages rank higher in Google.

You can even automate that internal linking (and save time) by using this plugin that links any word to your chosen page whenever it finds it in-content. The plugin hasn’t been updated for a while, but it works fine for all my blogs. You can set it to link only once per page (in case that word is used several times within one article) which is something I usually do to avoid linking too much:

Add an In-Content Call-to-Action

Another pretty non-intrusive way to add in-content call-to-action without being too “salesy” is to use a so-called two-step opt-in option. With a two-step opt-in, readers don’t see a form right within content and have to click a link for it to load.

The two-step opt-in option is based on the concept known in persuasion psychology as “foot-in-the-door tactic” which means that once users click a link inviting to sign-up and download, they feel more inclined to actually convert. Saying yes to a small request (e.g. clicking the link that invites to subscribe or download) predisposes you to say yes to a bigger request (e.g. to complete the form and opt-in).

This is a very popular in-content conversion optimization tactic because it doesn’t force opt-in forms inside the content and thus looks very legit.

Add Your CTA to Visuals

You already use visuals within your articles. Why not make them part of your conversion funnel? Images catch the eye, and adding a quick CTA will not hurt their visual appeal. Here’s a great tutorial on adding more actionable context to your images.

You can try other alternative lead generation channels using visual and interactive content. Flipsnack is one example I’ve tried. With it, you can turn any PDF file into a mobile-friendly flipbook, embed it within your content, and activate a lead gen option to collect emails from those engaging with your flipbook.

2. Re-Optimize Your Content to Get More Traffic

While you are there looking through your best performing content pages, you are likely to notice some of your content not performing as well as you’d hope. It may still get clicks, but you naturally want more.

Save those URLs to explore what you can do to improve their performance, especially when it comes to search referral traffic. That one is usually there to stay.

Optimize for a Group of Keywords to Diversify Rankings

The first step is to analyze if you are doing your best when it comes to selecting the most effective keywords. Run your usual keyword research routine based on each article topic and identify some phrases that may have some potential. If the topic is not too specific, you may want to cluster (i.e., group) those keywords to optimize your content for several of them.

Keyword clustering is the process of categorizing your keyword lists by a more specific topic. Topvisor is a great tool for understanding the concept of keyword clustering. It organizes overwhelming keyword lists into groups, giving me a clear overview of topics that can be united into separate categories. It’s a great tool to make sense of your niche queries helping you brainstorm content more effectively:

It’s a great tactic for re-addressing your old content rankings and making sure your blog posts target a group of related keywords instead of just one. These powerful SEO plugins for WordPress can also help you optimize your old content more efficiently.

Use DrumUp and ViralContentBee to Bring Fresh Social Media Shares

Social media platforms help on many levels, not just shares and clicks. They put your content out there, again and again, driving fresh mentions and links. (Both help in rankings, building trust and, thus, conversions.) The tools I am using for all my content, old and new, are:

DrumUp is a social media management platform that supports Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. My favorite feature is the ability to rotate Twitter shares for my articles to schedule them weeks and months ahead. For example, choose to re-publish any tweet 30 times every 30 days, and you’ll see it in your feed every month for two years. Of course, you can set how often and how many times you want the tweet to go live:

You can also add that tweet to your library to find it easily after years have passed and bring it back to your Twitter feed with one click.

ViralContentBee [Disclaimer: This is the project I co-founded] is a free platform that puts your content in front of active social media sharers. One of the biggest benefits of using it is that, as long as you keep adding credits to your content, it will rotate your content again and again, bringing you fresh shares to your older (but still useful) content.

I have about four years worth of content rotating there, and I see it shared to this day, bringing ongoing traffic. Apart from the obvious benefit (of putting my content in front of more people who can link to it), these social media mentions also bring that content to my attention. This encourages me to update it if anything becomes out-of-date or to write a follow-up.

Good luck making the most of your old content!

Our Top 10 2017 Social Media and Content Marketing Articles

As we close each year here at Convince & Convert, I like to take a look at our most popular articles, posts, and podcasts over the preceding 12 months. It’s not 100 percent scientific because articles get traffic in multiple ways (search, social, email, etc), but looking at the top 10 from among more than 300 pieces of content does give an indication what you—the amazing audience that visits our corner of the web—found most valuable.

It’s also a good compendium of useful content for folks that may have fallen behind on their reading and want to catch up. Here are our top 10 best-performing posts this year.

The 11 Critical Podcast Statistics of 2017

This is the second or third year I’ve written this piece, inspired by an annual study by our pals at Edison Research. Podcasts continue to soar in popularity (do you listen to our own Social Pros, Content Pros, or Experience This!)? I love that so many people find value in this summary every year!

How Social Media Has Evolved Over the Past 12 Years

We ran this last January and it FREAKED ME OUT. I mean, you obviously know that social has changed a lot in a decade, but to have it all spelled out in one article? Wow. It really hits home. Great job on this by Matt Banner.

4 Goal-Specific Ways to Measure Influencer Marketing ROI

The success of this post doesn’t surprise me. Nothing was as hot in social/content circles as influencer marketing in 2017, and this straightforward article by Kim Westwood helps frame up some potential measurement protocols. We’ll cover this topic more next year, as well.

The Truth About How Often to Post in Social Media

This was one of the mini-rants I wrote this year (I think I’m getting cranky in my middle age). Our friends at CoSchedule released a roll-up post about social media posting schedules. Good advice there, but my take is that you should publish . . . when you have something worthwhile for your audience. This one got a lot of chatter on Facebook and LinkedIn too.

8 Ways to Optimize Your Facebook Page

This one is super helpful because it includes step-by-step walkthroughs and specific screenshots of where to click and what to do. A great one from Ann Smarty that could be updated just about every quarter, considering how many changes Facebook constantly throws at us.

An A-to-Z Guide to Google Analytics for Content Marketers

This was quite a collaboration! Andy Crestodina and Orbit Media Studios wrote a terrific post on Google Analytics. Then, Payman Taei used the Visme tool to create a nifty infographic of the key concept. Payman pitched us to run his summary and infographic on Convince & Convert, and voilà! One of our most popular posts of the year. Thanks to everyone involved. The info and insights in this one are spot on.

11 Visual Storytelling Tools and How They’ll Help Your Content Marketing

Kayla Matthews is one of the best in the business at writing posts that round up useful tools and apps. Here, she used that superpower to pull together a great list of recommended tools (a bunch I’d never heard of) that content marketers can use to improve their visuals (which is SO important now).

The Formula to Calculate Content Marketing ROI

This one of my favorite posts this year. There’s so much confusion out there still about what ROI actually is, and how to calculate it legitimately for content marketing. Warning: This one has math (but that didn’t seem to hurt its popularity!).

6 Trends in Digital Advertising That Take Us from 2017 to 2020

Loved this future-casting from our very own Zontee Hou (who co-leads our strategy division). Are robots going to be doing ALL the digital advertising by 2020? Maybe!

The Proven Mechanics of Successful Social Media Writing

I mentioned CoSchedule above and their meta-study of social media publication cadences and timelines. Nathan Ellering led that initiative and also contributed a killer post here at Convince & Convert, full of VERY specific templates for how to phrase your content on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and beyond. Bravo, Nathan!

On behalf of all of us at the Convince & Convert blog, huge thanks to the millions of you who spend time with us every year. We appreciate your trust, and we’re looking forward to a great 2018 together!

~ Jay Baer, founder

How to Prevent “Prize Pigs” from Entering and Winning Your Sweepstakes

Although I have previously written about the different aspects of how entrants cheat to win a sweepstakes, how to prevent it, and how to turn your biggest fans into brand ambassadors and influencers, it seemed time to reiterate, review and update the topic as social channels and platforms continue to evolve.

Be sure to read:

• How to Stop Cheating in Social Media Contests
• Where Do ‘Professional Sweepers” Come From?

This specific post was precipitated as I, once again, received a message from a fellow sweeper about a marketing post from 2015. It keeps cropping up in their online searches for Facebook giveaways: How to Stop Facebook Fraud and Deter Prize Hunters. They emailed me because they are concerned, as an honest sweepstaker, they will be lumped in with the unsavory prize pigs who lie and cheat their way to winning.

How to Improve Your Facebook Ads Results

Do you want better results from your Facebook ad campaigns? Are your ads not delivering the results you need? In this article, you’ll discover three steps to optimize your Facebook ads to reach your ideal target audiences. #1: Compile Your Current Audience’s Attributes First things first, you need to get to know your audience. Who

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5 Awesome Twitter Features You Should Use Now

There are a zillion and one tools to help you manage your Twitter account. Trust me, I work for one of them. And while they’re all helpful and awesome in their own way, there are some nifty features built right into Twitter a lot of people don’t take advantage of.

Today, we’ll talk about what some of those features are and some clever ways to use them to improve your Twitter marketing efforts.

Some are kind of basic, so you Twitter pros might be familiar with them already. But I still recommend going through all of them here in this post. Even if you’re aware of these features, there may be a suggested use you hadn’t thought of.

Specifically, we’ll go over exactly how and why to:

• Quote a Tweet
• Use Twitter lists
• Tag accounts in tweets
• Pin a Tweet to the top of your profile
• Tweet links with clickable Images

Ready?

3 Advanced Google Analytics Techniques for B2B Marketers

When solving tough growth challenges, B2B marketers often turn to Google Analytics. For measuring activity and addressing questions that are answered only with data, GA is the industry standard. The problem is, many marketers look to the surface for insights that are mistakenly considered gospel.

Indeed, only 22 percent of marketers believe they run data-driven marketing initiatives that are achieving significant results. And I’d bet the other 78 percent are only scraping the tip of the analytics iceberg. But there are three advanced features you can use to generate real, granular insights from your analytics.

1. Advanced Segmentation

Google Analytics provides a whole range of useful insights out of the box. But without digging deeper, you’re not getting the full picture.

Many marketers make the mistake of taking basic reports at face value. If you’re serious about conversion optimization and growth, you need to segment your reporting. Thankfully, GA has an advanced segments feature that assists you in getting the most out of the platform. With it, it’s easy to create custom segments and reports based on demographic, technology, behavior, date, and traffic sources.

Why use segments? It opens up a whole host of benefits, including:

• The ability see all data and reports (including custom) for users by criteria.
• Include demographic data within your reports.
• Access and import segments developed by the Google team and other GA users.

Too many marketers take basic Google Analytics reports at face value, without digging deeper.
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Getting Started with Segmentation

To add new segments, make sure you’re under the Audience overview, and click on “+Add Segment”:

You’ll see the following list of default segments provided by GA:

There are many options, all of which have their uses. In this example, I’ve selected some traffic segments to compare different sources:

I now have a complete overview of performance by traffic source. I can see Session, Users, Average Session Duration, and Bounce Rate metrics for each source in one place, which shows you how different channels perform.

Experiment with different default segment options to become more familiar with the feature. Dig deep into the insights that solve your business challenges.

So, now you understand the power of segments. But we’ve only just scratched the surface. To get the most out of this feature, let’s dive into custom segments.

The Power of Custom Segments

Sure, Google Analytics has some useful default segments you can use. But the real power comes in the form of custom audiences.

To create a custom segment, click the “+Add Segment” button from earlier and click the “New Segment” button:

In this example, I’m going to create a segment called “Software Companies from Google” (under the Segment Name text box). I’ll then select Demographics > In-Market Segment > (contains) Software/Business & Productivity Software:

Followed by Traffic Source > Source (is one of) > Google. Once I’ve finalized my segment criteria, GA provides a summary with some preliminary metrics:

The conditions section takes this flexibility one step further. Let’s say I wanted to find out how many users view two or more pages during their visit. I would select “Page Depth” from the drop-down, followed by the “greater than” symbol, and then the number “1”:

I can add multiple conditions, as well as “and/or” statements, to dig deep into the data provided by GA. To apply your new custom filter, click the “+Add Segment” button, followed by “Custom,” and then select your new custom filter. You’ll see comparative metrics similar to before.

Want to get more advanced? Use Google’s Data Studio to further manipulate your reporting. This is especially useful for crunching all of your paid marketing data in one place.

Custom segments are an advanced feature, but as you can see, they are simple to set up. It all depends on how deep and granular you want to go with your data.

2. Advanced Dashboards

When looking for insights, visualization is key.

There are two ways to create a dashboard: build one from scratch or import a pre-existing one. Both have value, so let’s start by creating our own.

Creating Your Custom Dashboard

Let’s say you want to track various engagement metrics all in one place. In this example, we’re going to create three different widgets:

1. Comparison of sessions to bounce rate
2. Most visited pages
3. Engagement metrics of top traffic sources

Start by heading to Customization > Dashboards and then click “Create”:

Select “Blank Canvas” and name your dashboard something meaningful. We’ll call ours “Engagement Metrics”:

You’ll then see the “Add a Widget” dialog box. Our first widget will compare sessions to bounce rate. Here are the options we’ll select:

1. Widget title: “Sessions / Bounce Rate”
2. “Timeline” from the Standard section (this is where you’ll select how to visualize the data)
3. Graph the following metric over time: “Sessions.”
4. Compare with: Bounce Rate

Our dashboard now looks something like this:

Now let’s create a list of most visited pages using a table:

Followed by top traffic sources:

For good measure, I’m going to add some stand-alone metrics for deeper insight on this engagement dashboard. I’ll add sessions, bounce rate, and average time on page.

Finally, you can customize the layout of your dashboard using the “Customize Dashboard” button. Drag and drop the widgets to organize them any way you see fit. Here is an example of my final dashboard:

I used a 30 percent/70 percent layout, giving the graph more room to display data. The visualization is clearer and keeps snapshot data to the left.

There are many different ways to use dashboards. Analyzing certain demographics or traffic sources, for example.

However, it’s likely that someone else has already created a dashboard suited to your needs.

Great Dashboard Examples

Google has an entire gallery that hosts a huge number of dashboards you can import. To access it, create a new dashboard and click the “Import from Gallery” button. You should see a list that looks like this:

You can search for dashboards by keywords or use the filters to find them by ranking and category. For example, if I search for “social media traffic,” I see results ordered by popularity.

Here are five powerful dashboards you can import and use immediately.

Content Marketing Dashboard

Get a complete overview of the performance of your content marketing efforts. For some widgets, you may need to change the “Page path level 1” filter to reflect your taxonomy.

Download the content marketing dashboard

PPC Dashboard

If you’re pouring a lot of money into AdWords, this dashboard will give you insight on how paid traffic is performing at a high level.

Download the PPC dashboard here

Mobile Dashboard

Device metrics are important when analyzing your site performance. Segmenting data by mobile users will show you if you need to optimize your site for mobile.

Download the mobile dashboard

Social Media Dashboard

See how well your social traffic performs across your site and content, as well as what these users are worth to your business.

Download the social media dashboard

Site Performance Dashboard

It’s becoming more apparent that site speed is a major SEO ranking factor. Site speed also shapes the experience of your users. Keep an eye on your website diagnostics with this dashboard.

Download the site performance dashboard

Dashboards will help you monitor the metrics that matter. But this requires you to have these goals defined within GA in the first place. Let’s look at some advanced goal tracking features to ensure you’re getting the most out of your analytics.

3. Advanced Goal Tracking

As a marketer, you know the..

6 Instagram Hacks for Better Instagram Stories

Want to learn about some hidden Instagram Stories tools? Wondering how to change pen sizes, color-match text, and more? In this article, you’ll discover six Instagram tricks for enhancing Instagram stories that will engage your audience. #1: Customize Font Colors To add text to your Instagram stories, tap the Aa icon in the top-right corner

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