Keep old stuff interesting

In the world of blogs and news aggregation, people are accustomed to several updates every day from sites they frequent. Some of these sites just aggregate from other sources (usually sites with a niche) and occasionally add some short commentary. However, most businesses launch just a few products every year. How can you maintain interest in your old products or old content in between launches. What else can you cover in between to make sure interest is maintained or lifted for potential new products and you don’t cannibalize old products? This is assuming you already have an established community, corporate blog and PR channel.

Bug fixes and Updates

computer bugIf you create software and you release patches or updates, try to talk about the benefits. For example, if you have software and an update either fixes or adds to the functionality in a new and exciting way it’s beneficial to share that information. You can not only blog about it on your own, but also touch base with bloggers and people that reviewed your product in the past to ask them to take a look again. This could even turn a negative review into a positive review; it’s especially important to reply to reviews if the software was crashing due to a serious bug that’s since been resolved. Depending on the reach of that blogger, an update to their post can start a whole new ramp up of word of mouth for your product. It may even help to improve previously negative reviews.

User Generated Content

play.create.share.Many products today allow for their users to generate content. Whether it’s a game where they create levels or a video camera that allows quick sharing on YouTube, there will always be people creating and sharing their work. Even if you’re a blogger, you can leverage the work of other bloggers talking about a similar subject to your focus. You can create posts that are just snippets directing people at another bloggers site and maybe they’ll return the favor eventually. The point is that highlighting work your fans and people of similar interests have done will make sure people know you have a vested interest in the community and are not simply producing a product and then moving on to the next thing. Set up Google Alerts and subscribe to RSS feeds to stay on top of important content related to your subject matter. Check in on Digg.com and Reddit.com as well. This will make sure you’re at the forefront when something breaks out (old or new) and you can get a bite of the pie.

What’s old is new

RemixSometimes you can reinvigorate interest around old products, blogs, etc. when you release something new. You can highlight older items people that are similar to the newest item. This can help renew the old stuff without really cannibalizing your new release. Can you imagine watching season 5 of Dexter without having watched the previous seasons? I can’t. If season 5 is announced and you sell DVD box sets of the prior seasons, take advantage of the urge people have to catch up on the previous seasons. If you run a TV blog, talk about what happened in season 4 and give your top 5 predictions for season 5… At the end of season 5, you can even review and see what you got right!

There’s a lot of other ways to handle this. How do you keep content fresh? Post in the comments.