Learn to Love Your Existing Content - 5 Ways to Get Visibility

For the most part, articles about content focus promotion on new content launches.

Today I want to focus on getting the most out of (and in some cases, breathing new life into) existing content.

We often see clients who have various content assets already. If possible, I always recommend using what's in hand more without indiscriminately pumping out new content.

For the following exercise, we must begin by identifying content assets; we will look for loved and underloved assets.

Unloved = content that exists but no one has even seen it. It has very few links, social shares, and little or no traffic.Underloved = content that exists, launches and does nothing, but never reaches its full potential. (I can count on one hand how many times we've found a piece that we can't squeeze at least one campaign from.)It is important to note that, in many cases, we have been warned of unloved content because it is basically invisible but potentially very valuable. One good example of this will be an internal knowledge base that your sales team maintains.

Identify pages with potentialIt is often easier to find content underloved than to find content that is not loved at all.

Our preferred method is to plug the domain into Ahrefs.com Site Explorer, navigate to the "Top Pages" tab (which they redesigned now seems to be called "Best By Links"), and start working your way through the URL you find.

Your SEO Expert Learn How to Love Get Content for the Visibility

You can also use Ahrefs.com's "Best By Stock" feature, which will present all pages in their order number of social shares. Again, this can be useful in terms of pointing you to assets that can do well with some additional promotions.

I tend to pull together all the URLs that I found so that I can work on them / review in conjunction with other sources.

Other sources are, in this case:

Clients (or maybe colleagues in your company) remind you of "invisible" contentGoogle Analytics to identify pages that might get traffic but do not have social links or sharesSitemap or crawl from your domainnow you have to have all the existing content assets. You are ready for this match against any opportunities for content in your market that you have identified before, or as a result of evaluating assets you have discovered and researched the opportunities.

This might include things like:

Keywords - your keywords have identified around a particular topic area that is targeted to be feasibleLink opportunities broken - Maybe you have identified the specific broken source that you want to target. (Shameless Plug: Our broken prospecting Link tool must launch later this month.)vein rich opportunity links - Maybe you've seen a niche in your market that is very interesting from a connecting perspective.Now you can judge whether your content has a suitable opportunity. This might not be a perfect match, but is it close enough to not guarantee creating a new piece of content?

If a new piece of content is really needed, set the chance that in addition to supporting others for now. Remember, now we only focus on priming and promoting existing content.

Priming existing contentI said we would not create new content, but there are some jobs involved. Unless you are truly lucky, the content assets you find will probably need a little TLC before they are ready to be promoted.

Repurpose / reformatSo... I'm lying. This involves creating a new piece of content. But, in my defense, you take meat from existing assets and create something that fits the opportunity you are looking for.

In essence, you will extract ideas from content assets to produce something that is worthy of promotion. A good example of this might be taking key ideas from a webinar and changing that into a cheatsheet; this can be promoted as a resource much easier than a full webinar on.

ConsolidationThis is, by far, the most common scenario. Clients will come to us from other providers who have said that 4 blog posts per month will change their business. In isolation, most of these blog posts are not worth promoting. When consolidating, however, they can become something bigger.

Increasethis involves increasing a content that is almost there but maybe missing one or two parts, or it can be updated with the latest industry best practices.

Optimizethis can increase the format of a piece to make it easier to digest or - maybe more crucial - adjust the page to target certain keywords. For example, we have just finished working with clients to update and optimize existing blog posts for certain keywords that attract large search volumes in their markets. In one case, this means a solid blog post that is truly loved now ranks in the top three results for terms that will search around 10,000 times per month. This is not a commercial keyword, but rather information questions that have the potential to lead people to the client's commercial landing page.

Promote existing content# 1: Reach people who have shared similar contentA good place to start when promoting content for some proactive outreach. What better place to start compared to people who have been associated with similar / related content?

This can be quite a manual process: searching for various keywords related to content, identifying websites that have said content, plugging in every URL into Ahrefs, Majestic, or Open Site Explorer to see who the sponsor is, sorting through to see who is worth contacting, and then do the actual outreach.

For this purpose, we build our (free) Similar Content Prospecting Tool to take weight from this process. You enter keywords and find content that ranks highest for them, gathers people who connect to content that, filters through and removes lower-end things, and presents the top link for you to review and export, ready to contact.

You can find people who link to similar content or, with the right keywords, you can find people who link to related content. Both prospect groups may be interested in connecting to you.

For example, let's say you have a content that looks at keeping children safe on their smartphone. You might want to identify people who link to top-ranking content on "Internet security," because it is possible to become a crossover. Those prospects will be potentially interested in your content because it fills the gap that is currently on their site.

For further reading, see: You Can Get Links from Cold Outreach.

• 2: Look for opportunities for broken linksI know I've installed it once before, but we launched Linkrot.com later this month (all that is good) and this will automate the process of finding broken link opportunities. For now, potential customers for the opportunity can be a largely manual process (see additional resources related to below to get a feel for the process). This can subside with extensions such as LinkMiner from Jon Cooper on PointBlankSEO. And of course there are prospective devices on the market today who can help with searches, such as BrokenLinkBuilding.com.

Broken building links are very strong and, in my opinion, are still underutilized. For those who don't know, at the most basic level involving pages) find that it is used to exist but is now dead and that people have been associated with, b) adjusting your content assets to suit those opportunities, and c) reaching out to people who connect, suggest they update their link to your page.

Consider this graph:

Your SEO Expert Learn How to Love Get Content for the Visibility

Source: Does Outreach Short Emails Get You More Links?

As you can see, publishing the rate (the percentage of people connecting compared to the number contacted) is much higher than other reasons for outreach.

For the record, before you go ignore another technique: the opportunity pool is significantly smaller for building broken links. So, while you might be converting more prospects into links, there will be fewer prospects to start with.

One of the fastest ways to find broken links manually is to look for resource pages in your industry and scan them for dead pages.

For further reading, see: Broken Link Building Bible, Creative Broken Link Building Strategy, 53 Broken Link Resources.

• 3: Develop a new perspectivethis applies especially to underloved content assets. Customizing your niche pitch can have a significant impact on publishing levels.

This might involve more than just adjusting the prospecting effort and your email framework. This might involve tweaking your part of the content to better suit what you plan to target.

A simple example will target different countries. Maybe you have successfully reached schools in the US. With some adjustments to your pieces and approaches, you might be able to find schools in the UK or Canada that might also find your content useful and link-worthy.

• 4: Consider consideration paidIn the past, I have recommended offerings like Outbrain and Taboola. In the early days of both of these platforms we really looked back really well, but I'm not ashamed to say that we can't make them work again. Your SEO Expert Learn How to Love Get Content for the Visibility

I think this is a lot of reasons for this. Consumers are becoming increasingly blind to this "on the web" link; there seems to be limited quality control in terms of advertisers or advertisements so they have become increasingly spam-looking (which adversely affects the click-through ratio); and finally, due to a surge in popularity, traffic isn't all that cheap anymore.

Your SEO Expert Learn How to Love Get Content for the Visibility

One platform that I think is underestimated is StumbleUpon Paid Discovery; we find it useful to strengthen content along with proactive outreach.

I also like Facebook ads as a way to reach a very specific audience. However, we usually only use paid media like this where the purpose of the campaign goes beyond link building because it is really difficult to draw a direct line between spending your Facebook ads and the number of referring domains.

• 5: Connect your content to a wider storyYes, I know people say that press releases die. Of course, as a form of link building or the only method of generating press, they are only possible. But to announce content, they can still be very effective.

We have found if you can take advantage of developing and going hyper-focused stories, then you can A) generate some coverage of your content and B) utilize coverage to further coverage with some proactive outreach.

You might think this sounds like a technique for a new piece of content, but that's not so. We have just found this approach useful in campaigns where prospects are indifferent to our standard outreach approach. They feel that the problem we are talking about either does not matter or does not apply to them. A written press release can change all that.

You turn the problem around his head, so that the wider story isn't just a piece of your content. Punchy titles, some official statistics and good quotes from the CEO can help generate some initial coverage. You can then take initial coverage and use it as social proof in your proactive outreach.

Any questions or ways that you squeeze juice more than the content you have? I will welcome them in the comments section below.

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