How Do I Repurpose My Content?

I think about content a lot – I have a feeling we all do. Whether you work for yourself or you work for a company, content is king, queen and, well, it’s really the whole chessboard, isn’t it?

We have multiple platforms to plan, strategize, engage and check on a regular basis, not to mention the writing and designing of the content itself.

As you once again diligently draft a new round of content or while you are feeling desperately delinquent on being “behind” on new content, have you ever thought maybe I’ll just share an old blog post and be done with it?

Well, why couldn’t you?

Think of the content you’ve created that is currently languishing in a heap of digital dust bunnies somewhere on page 8 of your blog navigation or back in a 2021 newsletter.

Taking inspiration from being green – recycling and upcycling – could we reuse our content, too?

Get your #2 pencils and yellowing notepads out and start taking notes, lovely human, because I’m here to tell you yes and how.

Recycling, or repurposing content as it’s more commonly known, is taking one piece of content and using it in a different way, usually on a different platform.

Upcycle: Where else can you use it?

That list you created of 10 Things You Could Do For Yourself Right Now If You Could Just Find 10 Minutes Between Meditation, Yoga And Journaling At 5am?

That’s a few longer YouTube videos or 10 YouTube shorts around 1 minute apiece.

Each one of those 10 things is an Instagram post with a caption.

Pinterest How-tos.

10 Tik-Tok dances. (you never know, right?)

This amounts to 10 additional pieces of content. Content for 10 days or 10 pieces for one day – in which case, I bow to your content creation prowess!

You could also reverse it – if you wrote a longer blog or newsletter, can it be summed up into a list to create a one-page download?

Recycle: Themes or Related Content

Do you have a number of blog posts that are all related to one theme or idea? You can bring them all together in one place: an ebook for download. Make a nice cover, put them in the order to be read and voila! (ok, it’s rarely THAT easy but we’ll go with it for now) This could be for pay or free or free with an email sign up (bonus: list growing!).

You can link to a category page that shows all the posts together or – 

you could create a digest page that shows the posts in order of how they are best read. You could add a summary description or intro video to the top. (like this) This is similar to the ebook but now you have a new page on your website to link to (bonus: SEO-ing!)

Recycle: Oldie but Goodie

Search engines have us fooled into believing that the most relevant content is the newest. Just because it’s older, doesn’t mean it’s not relevant. Even within web design and tech, there are plenty of topics that remain relevant no matter how fast things change.

Even within my field, which seems to change every week, there are still topics and ideas that remain relevant. For example, the post I wrote about the importance of content coming before design remains as relevant today as it was when I wrote it. Some examples or images may need to be updated in an older post – I updated the main header image in my example – but the ideas hold true.