Guest post by Shanna Mallon from Straight North.You won’t be blogging long before you realize writing regular content takes a lot of regular work—but when you feel like throwing in the towel, don’t.Figure out how to blog more efficiently instead. Consider these five ways to make the most of your blogging efforts by repurposing your existing posts!It’s Marketing 101 to publish an email newsletter to an opt-in list of subscribers—but if you’ve been running a newsletter for a long time, you know it’s easy to run out of ideas for new content. What should you do? Consider this: Your archives are a goldmine of newsletter ideas. Think about it. Many of your subscribers are newer readers who haven’t seen old posts, and even long-time readers forget content from several years ago. Take an old post and tweak it to be relevant and updated for today, and turn that into your email body. Another idea is to craft a new article for the bulk of your newsletter but link to archived posts in the second section.If you’ve been blogging awhile, you’ve likely built up a large body of content that could easily be reformatted into an ebook. Find a common theme or storyline and pull all relevant posts together, along with a decent chunk of new content, and you have a packaged product you can sell or give away.Highlight past content by creating list-style posts or pages that group together related entries. You might create a blog page that features all your posts on search engine optimization (SEO), for example, or you might post a recap post at the end of each month that highlights everything you’ve covered in the last 30 days. In either case, you’re drawing readers back to archived content and giving old posts fresh life.As all brands know by now, social media is a powerful tool for highlighting content—but that includes more than just new content; you can use social media to highlight past content, too. Here are some ideas:Throwback Thursdays: Made popular on social sites like Instagram, Throwback Thursdays encourage users to post old photos on social media. Why not take the same idea and apply it to blog content? Make Throwback Thursdays a feature on your Facebook page, where you link to old posts.Tweet Old Posts: For bloggers with WordPress-based sites, installing the free plugin “Tweet Old Post” is an easy, convenient way to draw eyes to old content. It takes only a few minutes to install and customize, and then the plugin automatically pulls together your old articles and features them on Twitter.Pin Your Pictures: Pin images from your posts to Pinterest, writing a short, interesting description after each one.Recap Your Story on Facebook or Twitter: Post the main points from a blog post to a social site like Facebook or Twitter, point by point.Just because a piece of content starts online doesn’t mean it needs to stay there. The fact is, blog content provides an excellent foundation for offline materials, from presentations to marketing pamphlets to training manuals. Take a look at the content you’ve already posted, and ask yourself what offline uses it might serve. Since the content is already written, all you have to do is pull it and repurpose it.
Take the above tips to heart, and you can turn hours of blogging into more than blog posts. Yet these ideas only scratch the surface of ways to repurpose old articles—What other ideas have you tried? When it comes to recycling blog content, the more ideas, the better, so share your best blogging efficiency tips here!
Photo credit: Mike Bailey-Gates.
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