Confessions of a Six Figure Professional Blogger

The Art of Recycling Blog Content

December 29, 2008 | Blogging, Feature

If you are a serious blogger, chances are you’ve written quite a lot of really good content for your blog. That content gets attention for a little while, then it falls into the blog archives and ends up all but forgotten. What a waste! But, you do have some tactics at your disposal.

recycling On this blog, I recently released a free report called the Twitter Manual. I think it came out pretty good if I do say so myself. :) However, what you may not know is that it took me less than two hours to create that report. Most of that time was spent on filling in some information gaps and, of course, formatting.

How did I do it so quickly? Because 90% of that report was already written by me in the form of past blog posts.

I literally searched both of my main sites for posts about Twitter, chose the best ones, copy/pasted them into the document, re-worked some things to make the document flow – and that’s it.

The result is a free report that I can make available to my readers.

This is one possible way of recycling old blog content. A few other tactics might include:

  1. Re-publishing. I personally don’t see anything wrong with editing the date on a past post and bringing it to the forefront again. Several sites probably did this during the holidays. If it is relevant to a current event and you already wrote it, just bring it forward.
  2. Best Of. From time to time, you can do a “best of” post where you link to your own posts from the past. It can be theme related or it could be time-based (i.e. best of the last month). You might even consider putting a “best of” tab on the top of your blog and manually link to your best stuff.
  3. Feature Newsletters. A strategy I recently started over on PCMech was to make use of the autoresponder system with Aweber to provide monthly feature emails based around a theme. In that email, I link to past posts on the site based around that theme. I can talk more about this a little later.

The aim is not to let your best material fall into the waste bin of your blog’s history. If it is really good stuff, your readers should know about it.

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  • The only problem is that you probably need a lot of posts before you can think of recycling them. But it's a great idea because so much good stuff gets lost in the archives. In fact, I wonder how many people bother to go through the archives
  • This is excellent advice. I recently brought forward an earlier post I did about doing art just for the money.

    I did this because I was thinking about the topic again, so it was at the top of my mind, but also because I have picked up new followers in the past few months, so I wanted them to have a chance to see it, too.

    The "best of" concept is a really good idea. I think I will consider that for a new year's post in 2010.

    Rock on, David!

    Jennifer Moore
    JenniferLynn Productions
  • David,
    I love your newsletters in my inbox as my RSS feeds tend to get forgotten as I use search to find specific articles on what I'm reading up on, not go back to what I'm subscribed to for research. Having your content 'in my face' by email piques my interest so I trot on over before I do anything else.
    As for recycling blog content, your 'if you like this' links at the bottom of every post takes me all over your site and I stick here for alot longer than I do other blogs. It works and I'll be emulating it as soon as I have enough posts to make it feasible.
    Thanks for being here for those of us who don't have your experience nor your professionalism as yet.
    Molly
  • Nice tips, thanks :)
  • These sure are some accepted ways to bring relevant information back to the forefront of one's site. The idea of doing a "Best Of" post is nice because it serves both purposes, as key material that was passed up can be re-presented, and readers will know that it was written in the past. The newsletter idea is also a great enhancement.
  • Great point. Man, I just started reading your blog and everything I've found has been timely. I'm also putting together a free report right now and have recycled some of the content from my blog. I was a little worried about doing that, but I think it's turning out well in the end. This article set my mind at ease, lol.
  • Sweet suggestion. I will look to do the same for list building. Thanks for sharing!
  • I like the feature newsletters approach.
  • Great practical information as usual.
  • Chadrack, yeah, that works. The idea is to just make sure that they don't just sit there in the archives.
  • Thanks for the great tips.
  • This indeed is a nice little strategy to always keep past posts fresh instead of allowing them to 'waste' away in the archives.

    I think another strategy is doing a new post and linking to related posts that must have been very popular some time past.

    Thanks for this great idea.
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