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the best way to use old content

As a reminder, we’re talking about creating client-focused content for your brand. And specifically, why would you want to develop client-focused content in the first place? It means that you are balancing your needs, your brand, with the needs of your clients or your audience, so they actually stick around and, you know, pay attention to you. That really holds true whether you’re a blogger influencer, a course creator, or a regular service provider who’s creating content as a marketing mechanism for your business. 

Balancing old content

Let’s focus on old today, as in old content. Whether we’re talking about a simple, one-social-media-platform content plan, or whether we’re talking about your whole network of contents, you’re going to have old content that you’ve created in the past. So how do you balance old content with other content in your business and the content you’re creating? 

(And if you’re starting out fresh today, you’re a brand new baby business, you will eventually have old content.) And actually, if you’re starting out, maybe as you create this content, you’ll make it even better than some of us did when we first started! 

Revisiting Old Cornerstone Content

We’re going to start by revisiting old cornerstone content. And there are a couple of different ways you could do that. But first, let’s talk about what cornerstone content is. 

What is cornerstone content?

I teach content plans to have three, maybe four content buckets. And when you have these content buckets, you can categorize what you’re talking about. Having those buckets ensures you say on brand, and you don’t start talking about your favorite tea latte flavor, just because you happen to be interested in it today, right? You can stay on brand by keeping anything you talked about within one of those content buckets. 

That said, you might have 20 topics in a bucket. But that bucket still is a category in itself. And you can create one epic piece of content that really just fleshes out that entire bucket. That’s your cornerstone content.

If you’re doing a blog, this will be like a 3000-6000-word epic article covering this entire subject in depth. If you are creating a content plan around which credit cards you should apply for to get the most bang for your buck with miles and cash back bonuses, you’re probably going to have a pretty epic piece on the overall strategy one might use. Then, you can have an epic article on the best ones for a person who does casual traveling. The best ones for people who don’t really want to use them for travel at all could be another. Those might be your three cornerstone topic pieces. 

So you might have a ton of subtopics. But that cornerstone piece of content is the be-all, end-all resource for your audience on that particular topic. 

Why is it called a cornerstone?

Now, if you knew anything about architecture and building way back a millennia ago, when they first started building structures that stood the test of time, there was that first stone that you laid. They called it the cornerstone because everything else moved out from around it. Everything else in your content bucket has to be somewhat related to that cornerstone piece. It all kind of falls within, and you can expand upon it. You can talk about it in many different ways. But it’s got to stick on that topic. That’s how you stay on brand.

How to Effectively Revisit Old Content

So now that we know what cornerstone content is, we’re going to go back to the revisiting your cornerstone content idea. You can revisit it in two, maybe three, different ways. 

Repurposing Content Method 1

You can repost it as if your cornerstone piece is an excellent podcast episode and you happened to record it three months ago or three years ago. You can repost the link today. You don’t have to let it die. You know, you can do that. If it’s a blog post, you know, it’s search. And if it’s search engine optimized, hopefully, Google is still finding it. But you can still repost it today. Same with a video, whatever the piece is, you can repost it exactly as is. 

Repurposing Content Method 2

You can also repost it and pair it with a new introductory story, analogy, or metaphor. The benefit of doing it this way is that you may have pieces of that story that didn’t attract a particular segment of your audience. But now that you pair it with a different story, you might be someone who can connect with them. Whereas, you know, three months ago when you posted that, you were not someone who could connect with them. So you can actually expand the reach of these pieces by having different analogies or introductory stories that you use to share that old content. 

Repurposing Content Method 3

The third way you can revisit your old content is by parceling out a piece of it. So if I were going to do that to this very video right here, I could take just this one segment and say, here’s how you repurpose just a small piece of your content. And I could clip this out of this video, and repost it that way. And then I could, you know, link it to the other two and say, here are the other two ways you can repurpose cornerstone content. I could also link it to what is cornerstone content in the first place, right? 

So these are all ways that you can very quickly revisit cornerstone content, hit that old of the old, new, borrowed, and blue home.