At this time of year, many people automatically recycle their Christmas tree, greetings cards and wrapping paper. Some even repurpose cards into gift tags to use next year (I did it once, but keep forgetting to use them!).
But have you thought about applying the same principle to old marketing content?
Recycling content you’ve already researched and written will save you a lot of time and effort – enabling you to get a welcome headstart on your content commitments for 2015.
10 suggestions for recycling content
Instead of always trying to create new content from scratch, there are numerous easy ways to get extra mileage out of existing content. These include:
- Extracting several quotes or stats from each blog post to use as individual tweets or Facebook posts (with a link back to the original post)
- Using a tool like Canva to show a key quote from a blog as an image (remember to include your source article’s URL to help drive traffic)
- Producing a new list-type blog post by extracting the main points from an old article
- Transforming a blog post or whitepaper into an infographic with a free tool like Piktochart
- Taking the best bits from an old how-to guide to use as blog posts or tweets
- Converting an old series of blog posts into a whitepaper or e-book
- Turning whitepapers or case studies into a themed series of blog posts
- Creating a short video based on a white paper topic (YouTube ‘tips’ videos are a great way to pull in traffic)
- Updating old prediction-type posts to reflect recent changes in the market
- Revisiting old blog posts and giving them a new twist, perhaps by linking into a topical event
With most of these tips, you’ll probably need to refresh or update the content a bit – either with some new text or by adding an extra visual or graphic – but it will still be a lot quicker than trying to completely reinvent the content wheel each time.
‘Slicing and dicing’ content
As Heather Lloyd from SEO Copywriting says:
Once you’ve figured out how to leverage what you have, the content creation process seems much more effortless. [] Recycling is good for the environment, and it’s great for your content, too!
Heather explains how a simple way to repurpose content (which is NOT to be confused with duplicating content) is to slice and dice it into many different final forms using the ‘Veg-O-Matic approach’. This is akin to chopping vegetables into assorted bite-sized, manageable pieces to suit the recipe.
So, there you have it: various tips for recycling content. I’d love to hear which of these you’ve already used or if you have any other ideas to share. Please do let me know in the comments.
(Main image courtesy of Stuart Miles at Freedigitalphotos.net)
Have your say