Make Your Blog Work Harder: How to Reuse Blog Content
If you think about the vast number of days stretching out before you, seemingly into eternity, countless and never-ending, and you remember that for each one of those days, your company’s website should have a new blog post going up…well, you might experience an overwhelming sense of despair. After all, how are you supposed to come up with new content for every single one of those days? What about days when the office gets crazy, and you have no creative fiber left in your person to draft up a new blog? And let’s not even think about those days, the ones where you have no time at all for the luxury of putting up a blog post.
Before you go off the deep end, let us come to you with some solace and comfort. We’ll teach you, right now, how to make your blog content work harder for you. The secret is very simple: re-purpose your content. Read on for the two best methods for how to reuse blog content. We’ll walk you through how to update old posts to make them relevant for today’s audience.
How to Reuse Blog Content
Re-purpose content
What content have you created? By now, it’s a lot of content. You’ll find it in places you haven’t even thought of – internal notes to the company, PowerPoint presentations to your networking group. Did you create an eBook? Or a template? Or an infographic?
All of these are sources of content, and you’re entitled to re-purposing them to suit your needs, namely, a new blog post. Try excerpting little bits of information – you’ll find that you have plenty of topics to cover in 500-word blog posts.
Update and Republish Old Posts
Have you heard of evergreen content? When you create content that is “evergreen,” or applicable no matter the season or year, you can easily reuse that blog content months – even years – later. That’s the beauty of creating quality content; you’ll feel comfortable using it again and again.
There’s a couple different ways to utilize evergreen content. You can, just like this heading states, just update the post, republishing like it’s brand new. In your update, you’ll remove any references that are now out of date and add in information that now applies. Make sure that you DO NOT update the URL or title. Doing so makes it harder on search engines, and you don’t want to hurt your SEO.
Make sure to take yourself out of your own shoes before republishing an old post. Sure, it makes sense to you. You wrote it! But what about those people who have never read your work before? Does the work seem dated to them? Take the post on a trial run by asking someone else in the office to proofread your work before it goes live. They’ll be able to tell you whether the post rings as inaccurate or old-fashioned.
Another way to put a little spit-shine on your old, republished blog posts: new imagery. Trends in imagery change with the times, too. Pick brand-new imagery for the new post. It won’t take you very long, but it gives long-term readers something new and interesting to look at.
Don’t try to deceive your readers. Let them know that you’ve updated your post. They won’t mind, but will appreciate being told. Check out the bottom of this post for an example of notifying readers when a post has been updated for modern audiences.
Create New Content from Old Content
Confused? Let me explain. You can take the general premise of your evergreen content and create a spin-off post from it. So, you’ve talked about imagery before. What about imagery that your company creates for itself? What about diving specifically into PowerPoint imagery? What about creating infographics? There’s plenty of ways to write about the old in a new way.
Once you’ve learned how to reuse blog content, you won’t be stuck wondering what to write about. You won’t worry about not having a new blog post ready for tomorrow. You won’t struggle to come up with something new and fresh. You’ll be able to keep your editorial calendar full and your creative ideas flowing.
This post was originally published in November 2014 and has been updated with new imagery and refreshed content.