It takes money and/or a great deal of effort to constantly create new content, but constant new content is what your fans crave. You need a steady flow of information to keep them engaged. This is probably the biggest expense most online marketers have to pay. If you do it yourself, it takes a great deal of time.

But why create brand new content when you’ve got all those old blog posts lying around not doing anything? I’m a huge proponent of repurposing content and I do it often. You can take your old blog posts and turn them into new content that your audience will love.

E-Books and Reports

Most people are surprised to hear this, but you can take a whole bunch of your old blog posts all related to the same theme, slap them together, add a table of contents and cover, and you’ve got an e-book ready for sale. If it’s short, call it a report. E-books and reports work great as freebies to get people to sign up for your list because they cost basically nothing for you to make, especially if you use old blog posts.

Isn’t it cheap and lazy to slap something together like this? I don’t think so and here’s why. Even if you sell your repackaged blog posts, you’re still giving people value. Think about all the bands that put out greatest hits albums. That’s what you’re doing. You’re gathering all the different information on a topic so they don’t have to. Besides that, if you’re selling it for a couple of dollars, nobody can really complain.

Multimedia

Old blog posts make great videos and podcasts. For videos, you can use an old post as a script. Don’t just read it, but use it as an outline and follow it loosely. Your video can be just you talking or you can demonstrate with a product as you talk. You can also create graphics or a slideshow. There are lots of video production shortcuts.

Depending on the audience, podcasts might be suitable. I say ‘depending on the audience’ because in some niches, people just don’t go for them. Self-help people especially love podcasts. You can read your old posts and like the ebook idea, string them together into something longer. You can also use these posts for talking points for videos or podcasts where you interview people or have a discussion.

Helpful Resources

There are lots of ways to turn old content into helpful resources for your fans. Take several blog posts, edit accordingly, and create a quick reference guide. You can trim posts down and turn them all into bulleted lists. Make it so that they can look at the post and take it in all at once.

You can shorten your posts to create ‘cheat sheets.’ These are one page lists of information for your users to keep handy. For example, if you’ve got an old blog post on what to do if your site is hacked, turn it into a list of steps.

Infographics

Infographics are hot right now and they’re easy to make. There are software programs where you just plug the information in and then design the graphics. Old blog posts make great infographics. You can turn one post into a graphic, or take several that are related to make a bigger one.

When you’re repurposing old content, just keep one thing in mind – offer value. Make it original enough or helpful in some way so that you’re not just regurgitating the same information.

Tony

Just starting out? Need some “Plain Talking advice”?

Do it now – fill in your name & email address – what could be simpler?