Blog updating

What blog updating is

Blog updating is taking posts you already published and making them worth reading again. The facts are brought up to date, the structure is fixed so the answer comes first, the dated parts are removed, and anything you have learned since is added. The post keeps its address, so every link pointing at it keeps working.

It is not proofreading an old post, and it is not a light tidy. A properly updated post is often half new writing. The saving is not in the writing; it is in everything around it. The subject is already chosen and proven, the research exists, and nobody has to commission anything. That is why updating ten posts usually costs less and earns sooner than writing five new ones.

It is also not quite the same service as content refreshes, which start from which pages used to bring people in and have slipped. Blog updating starts from the editorial question instead: is this post still true, still useful, and still something you would be happy for a buyer to read. The two overlap, but they select different posts, and a blog full of posts that were never found needs the editorial question first.

When you need one

You need this when you have an archive. Thirty posts or more, written over several years, probably by more than one person, with nobody able to say which are still accurate. That describes most business blogs that have been running a while.

It is also the right first move before commissioning anything new. Adding post thirty-one to thirty posts you have not read is how blogs become embarrassing. A buyer who finds a confident, wrong answer from four years ago does not conclude that you have improved since.

You do not need this if the archive is thin, say under a dozen posts, and your buyers' questions are answered nowhere. There is nothing to rescue, and you want new pieces answering one question each. You also do not need it if most of the archive should simply go: deleting and merging weak pages is pruning, and it is cheaper than updating things never worth keeping.

How posts are chosen

The selection decides whether this is money well spent, so it is done in writing and shown to you before anything is rewritten. Every post is sorted against four questions.

Is anybody still asking this. A post answering a question buyers stopped asking is not worth an hour, however well written it was.

Is it wrong, or merely old. Wrong is urgent and gets fixed first. Old but still correct can wait, and sometimes needs only the dateable lines swapped.

Is it already doing something. A post other sites link to, or that your sales people send to prospects, deserves more attention than one nobody has opened.

Can it be fixed in an hour or does it need a day. Some posts need a figure changed, others need the argument rebuilt. Knowing which is which turns a vague intention into a sequence you can afford.

The four piles are revive, merge, retire and leave alone. The "leave alone" pile is usually larger than owners expect, which saves money.

What you get

The sorted list. Every post in the archive, with its pile, the reason, and an estimate of the work. It is yours whether or not any rewriting follows, and it doubles as a plan you could hand to somebody in-house.

The updated posts. Each returned as a finished article in a shared document, with the changes listed at the top so your subject expert can check the facts rather than reread the whole thing.

A merge and redirect note. Where posts overlap, which one survives, what moves into it, and what should redirect where. The redirects matter more than the writing and are the step most often skipped.

A re-dating decision per post. Whether the post shows a new date or keeps its original, and why. There is a right answer per post, and it should be a decision rather than an accident.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Winnipeg company hiring out event and party equipment has forty-three blog posts written over six years by four different people. The owner knows the blog is stale but has no way to decide where to start and has been putting it off for two years.

The sorted list puts eleven posts in leave alone, mostly pieces about sizes and capacities that were correct and remain correct. Fourteen go to retire, including nine about specific events from years past and three about equipment no longer hired out. Nine posts on marquee sizing overlap so heavily that they merge into two, with seven redirects. That leaves nine to revive, and the top three are obvious: what a marquee hire costs, what a customer is responsible for in bad weather, and how much space a given guest count needs. All three are still asked weekly, and all three carry figures and a cancellation policy that changed. Those three are rewritten first, over about two weeks. The remaining six are scheduled across the following quarter, and no new post is commissioned until they are done.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. How big the archive is, who wrote it, and what you suspect is wrong. No charge.
2. Access. A read-only login, or an export, and whatever you have on which posts people actually open.
3. The sorted list. Five to eight working days for a typical archive, delivered as four piles with reasons. You move anything between piles.
4. A fixed price for the revive pile. Per post, in bands, so you can take the first three now and the rest later.
5. The rewriting. Roughly three to five posts a week once started, with a short accuracy query list for your specialist.
6. Handover. Updated posts, merge and redirect note, and the re-dating decisions, ready to publish or published for you.

What it costs

The sorted list is quoted as a fixed price after the half-hour call, based on how many posts there are. The rewriting is then priced per post in bands, because a figure swap and a rebuild are not the same job, and you are told which band each post falls into before committing to any of them. You can stop after the list. All figures are in CAD and agreed in writing before work starts. The pricing page shows the four ways of working, and if the archive needs continuing attention the monthly band usually beats a series of one-off passes.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. The retire pile gets acted on, with deletions and redirects handled through removing the pages dragging the rest down. The rescued posts get written into a review cycle so this does not happen again in four years, which is a plan for when each piece is reviewed, refreshed or retired. And the next things commissioned tend to be pieces built to stay true, since the exercise makes plain what dating costs. None of that is assumed. An updating pass is complete on its own, and the sorted list is yours to use however you like.