How to Recycle Your Website’s Content

Over time, you’ll create a lot of content for your website. If you regularly keep up with your blog, you’ll end up with an impressive library of content after a while. For example, just two years after starting the Locallogy blog, we have almost 100 posts in our arsenal to use as supplementary content.

The problem is that the more you post, the less likely older posts will be seen—even if they’re still just as relevant. So, how do you make the most of your best content when it’s no longer new?

There are several ways you can repurpose your “old” content to give it a fresh look and reach an even wider audience than your original post did.

Even if you have used your older content as ablog post in the past, you can still repurpose it and create a new blog postout of it. By making a few changes to your wording and adding updates whereverpossible (such as new statistics or added links), you’ve managed to recycle oldcontent while still getting new information to your viewers.

One thing you don’t want to do, however, issimply copy and paste the original article, posting the exact same blog post toyour site again. It doesn’t provide any new information, and it might getflagged by Google as duplicate content.

An infographic is a great way to turn content into a visual element that you can add to a blog, post on social media or send in an email. It helps convey your main talking points in a way that’s often easier to digest, if there’s a lot of information. Content that leads to easy infographics includes lists, stats and processes.

If you don’t want to create any new content, you need to get your older content in front of your audience without waiting for them to dig through your site to find it on their own. An email newsletter is a simple way to do that. By sending content directly to your customers and/or newsletter subscribers, you get to control which posts are highlighted.

We’ve really focused on sending out weekly and monthly e-newsletters, and a lot of times, we add some of our older, popular content that new subscribers might have missed. It’s proven to be a great way to increase clicks on older content that wouldn’t have gotten nearly as many views now.

Another way to draw attention to old content is posting it on social media. There’s a good chance many of your followers haven’t read all your content, so they won’t mind seeing recycled content. And if you can find a way to tie your post in with a current or relevant trend, you’re even more likely to get views.

Using your old content to create new content not only saves you the time of writing an entirely new article, but it also allows you to utilize your original content in new ways. Try keeping an ongoing list of your posts so you can easily look back and see what content needs a refresher or could be easily updated. You’d be surprised at how much you can get out of your content.