5 Ways to Recycle Content

The concept of re-using an idea might sound lazy to some, but is actually one of the smartest content moves you can make for your business. You know I write regularly about recycling content, since it’s a core component of a sustainable content strategy. It costs less (i.e your time) to create new content because it’s not created from scratch. With that, here are 5 ways to recycle content and make the most of your ideas.

Re-promote existing content to keep it visible

Every day, new eyeballs land on your brand channels. Also, as time passes, people forget what they learned (c’mon, you do it, too!). If you have content that drives good engagement and is evergreen (useful all year), set a natural cadence to promote that content piece. 

Wrote a few back to school blog posts a year ago? You can still promote that content in future years! Just because you write it awhile ago, doesn’t mean it’s not helpful to teachers. 

Themes aside, if you’re writing about a NEW idea on a topic (say elapsed time), you can promote older content you’ve made about elapsed time and embed it (link) it in the new content piece. This way you’re cross promoting! 

Update existing content to keep it current and useful

While the tactic before was to promote older content as long as it’s relevant, there should be a strategy that allows you the ability to update older blog posts. This could look like:

• Hyperlinking older blog posts into new ones (& vice versa) 
• Checking outdated links 
• Adding relevant products you sell to older content pieces
• Checking IG stories to see if the highlights are updated
• Updating older products 

Convert existing content into another format

Repurpose existing information into a new piece of content

While a super long piece of content might help ensure you cover absolutely every question someone might have, you’re banking on the fact that a reader will stick around till the very end. Stretch one content piece into a series and now you 5 ways to recycle content. 

What this looks like: Say you write a blog post about ‘The ultimate Classroom Management Strategy’.

Afterwards you write separate blog posts that go into details about the 5 steps that make the classroom management ‘ultimate’

1. The pedagogy behind a Classroom Economy
2. How I set up my Classroom Economy for Classroom Management
3. 3 Fails Teachers have when implementing a Classroom Economy
4. How to create a student-run Classroom Economy
5. Most common asked Classroom Economy Questions 

The list could go on and on and on. Now, I have 5 different ways to link the classroom economy product that I sell AND I can hyperlink each individual blog post into the main ‘ultimate’ blog post. 

Is it starting to click yet? 🙂 

Curate existing content to provide a new context for information

On the flip side, you could have written a base piece of content and find that you’re getting questions, or you realize that there’s so much more you can tell. In this case, you write/create additional pieces of content that elaborate on the main content pieces. This allows you to dive deeper without keeping it in the same place, so that you’re creating more opportunity for backlinks and traffic.