Long-term Maintenance for Your Content

You wrote great content, it gets traffic and converts into sales. That’s great. Now what?

Things change and you can’t assume that what works today will continue working, without any change forever.

Great writers maintain responsibility for the content that they produce. They make sure that supply/demand still works in their favor, that the content is up-to-date, that the on-page metrics still look great, that the traffic funnel still works and that the page converts to its objectives.

There are many ways you can do this. Different companies have different systems in place to automate as much as possible and to alert you when action is needed. What’s important is that you remember that maintaining the content that you wrote is your responsibility. You need to account for this ongoing maintenance work when you plan your capacity for writing new content. Of course, you should aim to automate as much as possible, so that monitoring the performance of existing content takes a tiny amount of your time.

It’s OK to retire content

After a while, many content items need changes. One of these changes can be “it’s time to remove this content from our site”. When this happens, don’t try to salvage the content, repurpose it or bend reality. Some content stops being relevant and needed and it’s time to remove it from your site.

For example, there’s not much demand today for content that explains how to prepare your software for the Y2K bug. It was a really hot topic in 1999, but nobody needs it today. If you wrote a brilliant piece on preparing for the Y2K bug in 1999 and in 2001 you noticed that it gets no traffic, the best is to remove it. Accumulating old content that gets no traffic hurts your site in many ways. Prune it.