If you’ve been an online marketer for any extended period of time, you’ve seen many tools and programs that have come and gone in our industry. You may even have reviewed, taught, or published content about some of them.
For example, “Squidoo”. It was once an amazing option for article marketing, affiliate sales, and so on. Many people built their entire businesses on it. Maybe you still have some Squidoo blog posts just taking up space, and not performing for you at all.
Or what about “Periscope”? It was once a popular live-streaming app, but it’s now completely defunct. How about marketing strategies like Travis Sago’s ‘Bum Marketing’ method? While the concept might still be viable, the platforms and tools mentioned in the original content are mostly long gone.
Instead of just deleting everything, why not use AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology to put a fresh spin on the that old, outdated content and make it relevant again. In fact, you might be able to use some of that older content to compare and contrast the original to how it works now!
Don’t Let Outdated Content Sabotage Your Current Efforts
If you have been thinking that regularly publishing new content would outweigh the old, the truth is, search bots continually crawl your entire site – and they don’t want to send people to sites with old content that’s no longer relevant.
Not only that, but if someone in your target audience somehow happens to find the old content, when they land on it and see that your advice is outdated, they’re not going to take you seriously as a leader.
Most consumers are not going to check the publication date of the post or page. Plus, many themes don’t have dates listed anyway. So even if you are carefully ensuring that your current content is fully optimized for search engines, and relevant to your target audience, if you leave that old content untouched, it can sabotage your efforts.
Not only that, but these pages are likely already indexed and could be working to your benefit by helping you acquire new traffic to your site, and convert visitors into subscribers or buyers. When updating your old content, do Not change the existing URL.
Instead of reinventing the wheel and having to create content from scratch every single day, you want to spend part of your time as an online entrepreneur redeveloping old content so that it helps you get more attention and engagement.
As a niche leader, you also care about the journey that your target audience is on. That means you want to advise them of the proper strategies, tools, and platforms to use. If you are telling them in a very old blog post that they should be using a link farm and they follow your advice, only to have their site sabotaged by it, you will have to accept responsibility for misleading your audience.
This is even worse if you are in a niche like health or finances and where advice you are offering has the potential to damage someone’s health or income. So right now, you need to make a plan to revise this type of content, and then rely on Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to revamp it.
Identify Any Outdated Content You Previously Published
The first step in addressing this issue is to identify which content you either own as Private Label Rights, or have published as your own, that needs to be revisited and updated.
You can start by simply looking at your files for titles and headlines that discuss an outdated concept, or mention a platform or tool that you know is no longer functional. An example of this might be a package of PLR content about Squidoo or Periscope.
Yet another thing you can do is to rely on certain analytics tools that check the traffic to each piece of content on your site, so you can identify which ones are not getting any traffic, and double check those to see the reason why.
In addition to low traffic, pages that have a high bounce rate can be an indicator that the content you have published is not relevant to your target audience. For example, if you published a blog post about ‘The Easiest Way to Make Money as an Affiliate’, and someone who was interested in that topic clicked through only to see you are advising them to build a Squidoo lens, the bounce rate would be very high because it’s no longer operational.
When you are going through your content, think about any type of development in your niche or industry that has resulted in a big change or evolution. Consider what your competitors are doing with their content, and how it may differ from some of your older pieces.
You might also want to check the comments that are coming into your blog. Many marketers automatically do this and respond, but some tend to ignore it, and in this case, they might be asking questions or signaling to you that the content is out of date.
If you purchased content from a Private Label Rights seller, you can also go back through those purchases, on whatever platform you bought it through, to look at the topics and see if anything stands out as obsolete.
When you log into your WordPress dashboard, you can also click on Posts and then conduct a search for a keyword related to a platform, tool, or strategy that you know you may have written about.
You might see something about Vine or Google+ – both of which are no longer in existence. If readers land there and start trying to find out more, they’ll end up disappointed.
Look for strategies too, like ‘keyword stuffing’, ‘link farms’, ‘article spinners’ and more. These were shady to begin with, but many highlighted them as something viable to game the system.
Some of the strategies, such as ‘Bum Marketing’, are still good tactics to use, but they may mention some outdated information. For these, you can ask AI to update it with current information and steps that are more in line with the shifts that have occurred in the industry.
For example, if you have a strategy about achieving certain Search Engine Optimization goals with backlinks from just anywhere, you can change that to incorporate best practices that Google now puts forth, such as their ‘E-E-A-T’ (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness).
You might prompt AI like this: “Analyze the attached information for any concepts dated older than [year] and give me fresh insight about strategies being used today to change it to”.
You might also find smaller changes that need to be remedied, such as new features or capabilities that are now common in a tool or platform that were not there previously when you originally wrote your content.
There are also some legal or compliance updates that you may need to make. For example, self-publishing on Amazon now includes a step where you have to clarify or declare whether or not you have used Artificial Intelligence in the creation of your book.
You might also have to alter content where consumer behavior has changed over time. This might not be as relevant in the marketing industry as it is in others, but one example within our industry is Social Media Marketing – and the shifts that have evolved with high interest in video content now – more specifically, short form videos.
AI Can Audit Your Content & Create an Update Plan
Next, after identifying which content may need a refresher, you need to leverage AI to conduct an audit of it. The initial scan of the content will help you understand if it’s timely and relevant still.
You can also give AI data about traffic stats, bounce rates, low engagement, and other details – such as a keyword phrase you were targeting that AI might be able to replace with something better that consumers have recently begun using.
You might prompt AI like this: “Analyze the attached blog content and pinpoint any phrases that are no longer being used by consumers. Suggest better, high-impact keywords for me to use”.
If you have multiple pieces of content to work on, you can also ask AI to help you prioritize which ones need help first. For example, a high bounce rate might trump low engagement rates.
You can specify in your prompt that your goal is to get the page ranking higher in Google again, for example. Based on that goal, AI can help you make a determination of which content to do, and in what order.
You can also inform AI that you want the organization based on its predictive analysis of which content will benefit you the most, once it’s been updated. You might have two content pieces with outdated strategies being mentioned, so AI can discern which should be done first based off of your goal and what would help you the most.
It can consider factors like how old your content is, the enormity of how much has changed, how it performed in the past, and so on. You can also ask AI to identify outdated elements of the content.
You can simply prompt: “I have a blog post and I want you to identify any outdated elements in it”, then paste the post into ChatGPT. It might tell you things like “Squidoo is a defunct platform, and references are being made to the PLR market from 2006 and it’s different now, your statistics are wrong for the current industry”, and so on.
If you’re not sure what needs to be updated, you can also prompt AI like this: “What are the latest trends in [niche/industry]? Update my content piece to reflect current trends and tools, and remove anything outdated”.
Train AI to Update Content While Keeping the Same Brand Voice
Now you want to train AI to redo your content with fresh information. But you don’t want to lose your brand voice – and you also may want to keep some of the outdated information intact as a way to compare and contrast to the new details. For example, “We used to do things this way but now let’s look at a new way of doing it…”.
Let’s say you have a motivational and strategic content piece. In it, you’re delivering both tough love and strategy, combined. You can advise AI to update the content while keeping your branding voice.
The prompt might look like this: “Understanding the main gist of tough love advice, update the content for me to be new information and relevant to my target audience of fellow online entrepreneurs. Maintain my voice and style”.
Sometimes, in addition to removing outdated information or using it to compare it to new ideas, you can also prompt AI to add something new to the piece to account for any gaps in information.
For example, you may have had an article about SEO and in addition to asking AI to make changes based on current advice for the content creation, you can tell it to add any sections for new SEO strategies (like voice search optimization).
If you’re working with Private Label Rights or ghostwritten content that needs to be updated, you can train AI by uploading some of your own written works and telling it to freshen up the content with your same style and tone.
Sometimes, you might just want to prompt AI to advise you of any changes that need to be made. Other times, you can prompt it to go ahead and write the new content for you – whichever will serve you best.
Prompt AI to Incorporate Changes That Boost SEO
While you’re having AI adjust the content for repairing outdated information, you might as well have it optimize it for your current SEO goals as well. You might want AI to advise you like this: “Now that you’ve updated the old article about which platforms to use as an affiliate marketer, give me advice on what I should do to optimize this for search engine rankings”.
Or brainstorm with it – and ask it what primary keyword phrase you should be targeting, what keyword tags you should use, what new meta description you should have, as well as any alt tags within the content.
Even with content that may not be blatantly outdated, you can periodically have AI run an audit of it to see if your SEO strategy needs to be altered with certain keywords, etc. This can happen whenever the wording changes for what consumers type in when searching.
Republish and Notify Your Audience of Content Updates
When the content is revised you can update the place where it’s published so that the date changes. Then notify your list if you want to – as well as your social media followers.
Ideally, you’ll want to maintain the original URL for the historical SEO value, but that may not be possible in some instances if the URL has an outdated item in it. You can definitely update the time of the publication, which should occur naturally, and this will bring search bots back to the fresh content for new indexing.
Another thing you have to do is check to see if any of your internal links within your blog are pointing to that piece of content. If so, check the anchor text to make sure it is still relevant, and if you have changed the URL you’ll need to alter the link, too.
If the link has been changed, you can go into your system and create a 301 redirect so that anyone visiting the old URL is immediately transferred to the new one that has the fresh information.
When you do e-mail your subscribers or notify your social media followers, make sure you explain to them why you’ve updated the information and what they can learn when they visit the new content.
Try to make it an intriguing call-to-action so they want to revisit content they may have already consumed at an earlier date. You might even use a question that AI crafts for you to make them curious about what’s new.
Have AI Create a Plan to Keep Your Content Up-to-Date
While the plan to use AI to update irrelevant content is smart as an overhaul for your blog. Now that the technology is available, this is something you should be maintaining over time because you will always have content that needs to be freshened up in one way or another.
If you find out that a certain platform, tool, strategy, advice, or other item has changed or evolved, make sure you instantly revisit any content that you have on that topic and get AI to help you alter it as soon as possible.
Make sure you’re paying attention to your analytics so you can look at key metrics to determine which pages and posts are not performing well for you. Then, look at the reason why to see if an update with fresh content would solve the problem.
If nothing pops up that immediately triggers your need to check on content, you can still schedule a routine audit of your site’s content on a regular basis. You don’t need to do this daily, but you might set up a schedule where once a month or once a quarter, you go through the content you have published to see if any updates would be beneficial.
During this time, you may want to spend a few days not only looking at the content you have, to see if there are any glaring contradictions and current information compared to the old. Also research your industry and niche to see if there’s anything you may have missed that would contribute to the need to change your information.
Sometimes, we get so busy working on our current projects that we aren’t paying close attention to these trends, and something might slip through the cracks that could affect your audience.
You might also want to start a document, like an Excel spreadsheet, where you track two topics that are known to change continually: content leaks and search engine optimization.
That way, you can easily refer back to content that may need a quick injection of new ideas once every few months. It’s going to be much faster and easier for you to identify outdated content when you are tracking it. Then you can go to AI and have it quickly conduct an audit, and advise you of what changes you need to make, or have AI do for you.
Artificial intelligence technology is something that many marketers have adopted as a way to create and publish massive amounts of content in a shorter period of time. However, you also need to leverage it as a tool to prevent any problematic issues with old content. Think of yourself as behaving like a janitor of sorts, to clean up your blog and make it sparkle again.