Allison VanNestTomorrow is Pi Day! Grab yourself a slice of your favorite 3.14 (get it?) and gather round and talk about why so many of us feel the need to reinvent the wheel. Because while pi never repeats, your blog content can—and should—get reused.
One of the reasons people feel intimidated by business blogging is because they’re afraid of running out of new topics. Even if you only planned to post once a week, you’d still have to come up with fifty-two ideas. That’d burn out any blogger, but the good news is that there are many ways to reuse, repurpose, and recycle your existing content. Here are eight slices of blogging wisdom to get you started!
Infographics
Blogger Ian Smith recommends trawling your blog posts, white papers, and other resources to find interesting statistics, patterns, or trends. Online readers respond well to infographics, and you don’t even need graphic design skills to create one. “[T]ools like Piktochart.com and Easel.ly make it easy to hit the ground running with ready-to-use themes and templates,” says Smith.
Update Classic Posts
“At some point, even the best and most creative posts need to be updated,” says Marketing Expert Penny C. Sansevieri. “Pull in new content and add a fresh take, your readers will love it.” Revisit popular but outdated posts and update them with the latest information.
Break It Up
Fragment your content into small, bite-sized pieces for use on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and other social media platforms. Don’t let those gems of insight languish in an old, dusty blog post!
Reformat
Consider turning your existing blog posts into something new: a SlideShare presentation, a video, or a podcast. For beginner instructions on creating and sharing a podcast, check out this two-part tutorial!
Guest Posting
Guest blogging has a number of benefits, but we tend to focus on what guests can do for us. While that’s true, you can also edit, compile, and reframe your existing content to share as a guest post on other blogs.
Article Directories
You can also try submitting your reworked post as an article to a directory. Business Coach Dawn Lanier warns against submitting old posts as-is without rewriting. “That way you continue to get ‘credit’ for your original work and you’re not offering an exact duplicate, which will get you penalized by the search engines. Allow enough time for your post to get indexed before you submit your article.”
Top Ten Lists
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the Internet loves lists. Also cat videos. Create a list from excerpts of your favorite or most popular posts, linking back to the original content.
Book It
Bloggers are often shocked to discover that they’ve already written a book’s worth of content in their archives. Ali Luke of The Write Life recommends turning your blog into an eBook to reach a new audience and cross-promote your blog…and your business!
One word of warning: make sure to proofread your recycled content before you post it. If a typo or grammatical error sneaked past you the first time around—it happens to all of us, even word nerds like the folks at Grammarly—you can correct any mistakes you find in both the original post and your refreshed content.
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