11 Ways to Recycle Your Old Content

11 Ways to Recycle Your Old Content

There are many benefits to be derived from recycling old content like reaching new audiences and making the most of your content writing efforts. Many content made from some months to years ago that were highly popular and performed very well at the time could be repurposed in different formats as you’ll see in this article.

So here are eleven quality ways you can recycle old content for your new audience. There's something for everyone.

1. Webinar to YouTube Video:

Did you host a great webinar in the past with lots of attendees? Understandably, not everyone made it to the webinar but over several months, you've been getting new site visitors and leads who knew nothing about the webinar and what they missed out on. The webinar can be repurposed as a YouTube Video rather than letting it go to waste ensuring that you offer your an asset to your new and old visitors.

2. Recycle Old Blog Posts into Guides:

Consider repackaging several old posts you've made about a specific topic into a fresh new guide. For example, you have curated posts about using hashtags to boost searchability on Instagram, you can take those blog posts and turn them into a "Complete Guide to Instagram Perfection" which can be used for email marketing and lead generation. Having crafted high-quality posts, you don't want them to get lost and be forgotten. You can recycle old blog posts into guides to make them immortal forever.

3. Update Old Content:

Like most things in life, change is constant. How about updating your old posts? Maybe there is a new development or advice you would like to share on a topic you’ve written about in the past. You can take this old post, make slight adjustments and republish as new. Another way to go is to find old posts that have been performing well and generating a ton of traffic, leads or is still ranking highly for certain keywords for your business, do not update these and publish new, instead, update the content of the old post to maintain SEO value and promote again. On some blogging platforms, you can even change the publish date so it shows with a brand new date as if it was a new post.

4. PowerPoint Presentation:

After creating a PowerPoint presentation and delivering a great presentation, you'd like to see it used again. That great presentation with those beautiful complex graphs, amazing animations that can be repurposed into new slide decks. Now you get a new piece of content that didn't require much work putting together.

5. Interviews to ebook:

A popular form of content for blogs is interviews. You can reuse questions you sent to industry experts and put their answers into an expert advice ebook. There's no problem with this as some people prefer ebooks to blog posts because they can easily download the ebook and read later. Not only that, your new expert advice ebook may get new attention from people who missed the interview series before.

6. Visual Content With Pinterest Board

Do you have image heavy blog posts? You can make the most of these blog posts as image posts on Pinterest.

An example on this could be a post based on the best brand logos in a particular industry. You can upload pins of the best brand logos or even create a new board just for brand logos. These pins can be used to drive referral traffic to your website boosting your traffic sources.

7. Quora Q&A

Quora is a great source of content inspiration for many people. It provides users answers from the community to questions on several categories. To use Quora with your old blog post, take that post, look for a question on the topic and provide a detailed answer including links to the blog post proper. Those wanting a thorough answer would be more than glad to follow Quora to your website. Not only that, you also establish yourself as a leader as you engage with community members. 

8. Infographics

We talked about PowerPoint earlier, but do you know those stunning graphs and charts can be repurposed into infographics. Infographics are beautiful, highly informative and easy to read. However, infographics require a fair amount of research and design. It doesn’t have to be a major undertaking though. You can start with a good graph or chart and work it up from there. Just make sure it’s solid because no amount of prettying up can cover a weak content.

9. Statistics with Twitter Posts

Assuming you have created a solid stats post, sharing some coll and interesting facts or data about your industry. You can turn them into individual tweetable elements to get more leverage out of the stats. This can be done in ways like adding a “click to retweet” link to the end of some stats, using most interesting or compelling stats as tweets. Using any of this makes the content much more sharable and to have a better reach.

10. Blog Posts as Tips Newsletter

One beautiful way to recycle old posts is to promote them in weekly tips newsletter. You have already built your own list of email subscribers but they won’t be able to see everything you’ve written especially if your posts drop at a certain time of the day. A friendly tips-oriented newsletter can showcase your weeks’ best blog and provide an extra nudge for your readers to get on your site and read top quality content.

11. Podcasts 

A podcast is an easy way of making use of that limbo time between other productive activities. The idea of starting a podcast might be daunting, maybe because you are not so much of a great speaker. You can get on freelance platforms like Fiverr or Upwork to hire a melodious voice for a few bucks.

A professional voice over artist can read your blog posts out and just like that, you have a podcast. To get the best results, you have to edit the blog post to have a more relaxed and conversational tone.

These tips on recycling old content will ensure you get the most value for all of your content writing efforts. You’ll be able to provide your audience exceptional content in a variety of ways while generating new traffic all through the year.