The Recycled Blog

One of the most common blogging problems my clients have is coming up with a continuous stream of blog topics.

My clients are experts in various fields, yet few of them realize they already have a lot of EXISTING content they can reuse and repurpose for their blog.

If you're an expert or enthusiast in any topic, you probably already have plenty of content you can tap for your blog. Examples include:

• articles you've written for magazines, newspapers, other people's blogs or article directories
• special reports and books, including ebooks
• presentations you've made in workshops, seminars, teleseminars and webinars
• interviews you've given to journalists, bloggers, podcasters
• emails in which you've answered questions
• forum posts where you respond to questions or give advice to someone in your market

All this is raw material for your blog!

Recycling content you've already created is a perfectly legitimate and acceptable way of populating your blog. After all, not all your blog readers have read, heard or seen everything you've ever put out there.

By recycling content, not only do you make blogging easier. You're also making it possible to reach a wider audience and have more influence.

That said, there are ways to recycle existing content into blog posts that will make sure you continue to provide high-quality posts.

Tips for Recycling Content for Your Blog

When recycling, you want to create something that's unique and distinct from the original material. There are several ways you can do this easily and quickly:

1. Reformat

If you have a written material, turn it into an audio or video. If you already have an audio or video material, turn it into text. Hire a transcriptionist to make it painless. You've got an instant blog post, or possibly even several posts.

You can also reformat content from physical to digital formats. Turn your magazine articles into a blog post, for example.

The cool thing about reformatting is, if you also have a podcast or YouTube channel (or other video sharing channel), you can cross-post the same content there as well.

2. Zoom In

Another easy way to recycle existing content is by taking a snippet of a big piece. An excerpt from your special report or book, for example, makes for a good post — one that can spark interest in the whole content as well.

However, I prefer to zoom into a specific topic within a bigger piece of content and developing it into a totally new, unique piece.. For example, if you've previously written an article on “7 Tips for A Good Night's Sleep,” you could transform each of those tips into separate blog posts.

Got an ebook? Why not churn out a blog post out of each chapter.

The key is to go deeper into a specific topic and turn it into a piece of content that can stand alone.

3. Mashup

The mashup is the opposite of the zoom-in. In this technique, you combine various elements into a new, coherent whole.

Let's say you have a series of presentations on different strategies to increase employee retention in the workplace. Get the key points in each presentation and summarize them into a blog post.

These are just three of the ways you could recycle your existing content into useful, high-quality blog posts.

Think About It

The next time you're staring at the computer screen wondering to blog about, ask yourself: Am I, in fact, sitting on a blogging goldmine?

Make an inventory of the existing content you have. Refer to that list when you make your blog editorial calendar (you do have one, don't you?). Identify at least three different ways you can recycle each piece of content.

That, my friend, is the beauty and the secret to a recycled blog.

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Thank you!

photo credit: e-magic