Essential Tips For Content Recycling

Have you created great content over the past few years? Content that proved to have kept many visitors engaged and encouraged further browsing on your website? Content that succeeded in getting calls to action being accepted? Content that created great interest and moved targets further through the sales funnel? Content that just worked? What have you done with those posts and videos? Are they somewhere on your website in an e-archive and no-one knows about them? Then maybe it is time to consider content recycling.

By that, we do not mean that you dump your content gems somewhere for someone else to repurpose them. No, we mean that you can make great use of your old content by revamping and updating them and using them once more as part of your content strategy! By means of content recycling, you can lighten the content creation load. In addition, if it was previously successful, you can be fairly confident that the content will again have the desired effect. 

Benefits

Without content recycling, you risk allowing some of your best pieces of content material being discarded. Content recycling maximizes the effort that was put into the creation of the original piece of content! The result is that you save time trying to come up with entirely new ideas, plus you also get a greater return on time invested in the creation of the content material. Moreover, anyone who missed the content when it was first posted will have a chance to see it when recycled.

Selecting Material for Recycling

It is important to measure the quality of your content material. Only then can you really identify what makes ideal content recycling material. Look at the quality analytics of old content material. How effective has your content marketing material been? Re-use the material that has effectively driven targets to your website and improved engagement. So, consult analytics tools to determine which of your posts were the most popular – then repurpose these as great recycling material.

Alternatively, use posts that you always thought had great potential, but failed to deliver and remodel them on a structure that did give great results. Tools that measure social media performance also provide valuable information that helps to identify which content will make great recycled material. By finding social media updates that received a lot of shares and/or likes one can identify the ones that will make good recycle material. Once you have identified a high-performing post on one of your social media platforms, it can be repurposed for another social media platform – with just a few tweaks it is very likely to also deliver great results.

Look at your blogs, newsletters, email campaigns and social media posts and ask yourself:

– Which blogs worked to drive traffic to your website?

– Which emails had a good response? 

– Which social media posts were shared? 

– Which newsletters’ call to action gave results?

Revisit those identified as successful content, revamp them a little and use them again in a similar way.

Recycle a Successful Blog

A lot can be done with a successful blog: 

1. An old blog post can be revamped by simply changing some of the images – use more up to date images. 

2. A blog post can be revamped by presenting part of it in bulleted points or in diagrams and by including a short explainer video in the blog.

3. The critical points in a blog post can be extracted to share via social media.

4. A series of blog posts can become a great e-book! (And… an e-book can become a series of blog posts! And… a series of blog posts can become a series of explainer videos!)

5. A series of how-to blogs can be turned into a guide and used in email marketing.

6. A blog post can be made into an explainer video! 

7. A blog post can be revamped to become a shortened newsletter filled with useful info.  

8. You can even turn a blog post into an online podcast, which will be useful to targets who want to multitask and listen rather than look or read!

A few more ideas… 

1. Successful webinars can become short YouTube videos. 

2. Old explainer videos can be edited and redistributed via email. 

3. Case study data can be interesting sharing material – remarkable facts and data about the industry can be shared as tweets or short posts on social media.

4. Images, notes, diagrams, graphs and charts from presentations can be turned into infographics!

Successful content marketing involves regular creation of quality content material that keeps your target audience engaged. Recycling old material will help you to save time. More importantly, it will spare you the effort of coming up with new content on a regular basis. So, if you already have quality content – recycle it! After all, if it used to be great it has the potential to be great again!