Amanda Clark — November 5, 2019 
A good blog post represents a significant investment of your time and resources; and, a major depository of your subject matter expertise. So, what happens when you polish off a post, publish it to your website, and spread the word on social media? Hopefully, you’ll see a big spike in hits, likes, comments, and shares… but eventually, all that activity tends to taper off. That can be a deflating feeling.
But what if there was a way to extend the usefulness of your blog post? To really mine it for all its worth? As it turns out, there are a few ways to get the highest possible ROI from your content investment.
Here are our favorite strategies for truly maximizing the usefulness of each blog post.
Turn it into a “Pillar” Article
A pillar article tends to be a longer, evergreen piece of content that takes a comprehensive look at a particular topic. Once you write a pillar article, the next step is to break it down into individual sub-sections, ensuring that you include plenty of hyperlinks from the pillar to the sub-sections and vice versa. This strategy can enhance the user experience and lead to robust SEO results.
So take a look at some of your most popular blog posts. Could any of them qualify as pillar posts? For instance, maybe you have a lengthy Top 10 list posted to your blog. Consider breaking down each individual point into a smaller post of its own, using the pillar page as a jumping off point for more narrowly focused, supportive posts.
Make a Video
If you have a popular blog post that eventually loses some steam, one way to reinvigorate it is to use the blog as fodder for a video. In other words, once you’ve made a splash on Google, turn your attention to YouTube!
This doesn’t have to be an elaborate video, either. Simply use the blog post as an outline, talking through some key points, perhaps putting together some bulleted slides. It’s a great way to extend the life of a blog post and take your subject matter expertise to a new venue.
Make it into a Guest Post
You’ve shared your insights on your own blog, but there are still plenty of people who remain unreached. But if you know the topic has some juice, you can always write a second edition, ensuring to keep the same points intact but change all the wording, then submit it as a guest post to an industry blog or publication.
Not only does this help you get a little extra mileage from your original post, but it also gives you a way to generate some backlinks to your website, a major SEO win.
Update the Original
Finally, note that many topics will warrant regular updates. If you have popular posts from a year or two back, there may be some merit to reading back through them and seeing if anything’s changed. Are there new developments, trends, or technologies worth mentioning? Some supplemental materials you could include as links? Has your own thinking or perspective evolved in some way? Updating an older post with some new text can sometimes breathe new life into it, and possibly even trigger some new SEO benefits.
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