When your content strategy goes wrong

A major part of my post-launch content strategy was releasing blog posts on a regular cadence to drive traffic. As I built my site, I documented the process through partially written Markdown files. I stored these blog post stubs in a DONT-DELETE branch in my Git repository. Not quite best practice, but also not unusual to those who have had to clean up obsolete branches.

When it came time to pull one out of that branch, I decided the content reuse piece was in pretty good shape. I updated it, published the post, and felt good about where I’d taken it. It followed an AI-related post that was widely viewed (surprise!). Not surprisingly, the AI post was a bigger draw than content reuse.

…Then I noticed I’d already used a large portion of it on my already-published site structure post. Ironically, my blog post about reusing content duplicated my own content.

Test case

Once I discovered the mistake a few days later, I left both up for a couple of weeks to see what happened (also to figure out what to do next). Either no one noticed or no one notified me. Based on my Google Analytics, it seems to be the former.

Lessons learned

I had a chance to fix things that no one noticed. I restructured and rewrote three posts to make for tighter, more focused topics, and linked across them to (hopefully) drive traffic.

The reality is that this is a luxury you don’t have when you publish professional content at scale. In a production environment with a team of writers, my error would probably be noticed in a content review by someone who’s familiar with existing body of content. But this relies on humans, which is why it’s important to have governance and automated quality checks in place.

On the plus side, I got another blog post out of it.