It happens to all of us sooner or later…. we fall in love with a brand or a brilliant mind or an addictive product, and after searching high and low, we finally find the website dedicated to it. Thrilled to have more to fuel our new obsession, we devour the content on the site. Or we start to. But our appetite and interest are replaced with disappointment as the sad realization hits us that the website hasn’t been updated since “The Hangover” was the number one movie in the country. Clicking away from the site, we try to put the whole cyberdust-covered incident out of our minds.
Old, untouched company blogs and website content are repellent to those always in search of the newest information or the next big thing. I like to think of myself as a guy pretty open to reading all kinds of content, but when it comes to old blogs, I turn up my nose. Call it a symptom of content over saturation, or of sheer pickiness, but I think in the age of the Internet it’s fair to expect new content.
So why is it important for sites and blogs to stay “au courant”? For several reasons, actually. The most obvious is that today’s consumers like newness. “New” happens all day long, and while every company blog need not reflect up-to-the-second happenings, nearly every blog needs to be fresh with either what is on the minds of their readers or something to feed their readers’ minds. Content writers need to assume that if a topic was hot two days ago, chances are the topic is DOA today. It’s worth noting, however, that if the topic is a developing story that relates to a biz that can be covered daily, new views on the story can help prevent blog repetition.
Maximum freshness is also a way to assure good Search Engine Optimization juju. We learned from our little SEO tutorial a while back that blogs and sites that stay “in the new” often end up at the top of the search engine heap. Regardless of company size or dollars shelled out for AdSense, recently updated sites relevant to the search in question always end up numero uno or darn near close – sometimes a local paper will scoop the New York Times with a faster updated version of a headline story and before you know it, The Peoria Journal Star is sitting at the top of Google search.
Staying fresh can certainly be a pain in the neck. Honestly, who has time to update all day or re-tweet until their fingers cramp? Besides, can’t we just save time and recycle old blogs or pull from a folder of previously written material? While I understand these urges to make it easy on ourselves, I still say resist them. Shiny, new blogs are well worth the effort of producing them which, by the way, does not have to be Herculean. Simply posting videos or a few lines about a new product with a photo goes a long way to staying in the moment. Likewise, short little reaction pieces to trends happening in your industry can prevent your content from going stale. If all else fails, use your business’ blogs as a link portal to your favorite sites and videos.
Creating newness for readers on a blog that is based on how to’s and DIY can be a little tough because there’s only a certain number of ways you can skin a cat. So what I think what might be meaningful here is to expand (Such as giving it some background information or history or inserting links to other places) for each topic that your covering giving it a fresh look. And that might include putting in a video with it to spice it up.