Whether blogging is your passion or something you feel you have to do, I’m sure you put a lot of time and effort into creating your content. No matter how good a writer you are, most people will only read what you’ve posted recently, but with a little creativity, you can repurpose what you’ve written and get it working harder for you!

Mix and Match

Have you ever missed out on an opportunity to submit an article or blog post to an online or printed publication, because you couldn’t find the time to write something new? That’s too bad! You’ve got a bunch of great material at your fingertips, and just because they asked for something original doesn’t mean you have to start from scratch.

Why not take selections from several related posts and combine them into a new one? You’ll need to do a little editing to make it flow properly, but it’ll take a lot less time than coming up with something brand new.

Reuse and Recycle

Your old blog posts don’t have to disappear into obscurity! Some, such as event announcements, may be time-sensitive, but organizing principles don’t change, so a list of tips you prepared two years ago will be equally useful today. All you need is a way to promote them once they’ve disappeared from your home page and your subscribers have deleted them from their inboxes or RSS readers.

The Revive Social WordPress plug-in lets you bring your earlier work to the attention of newer readers and revive the discussions on those posts by automatically posting links to your social media accounts. I’ve used it in the past, but stopped when it went out of control one day.

If you opt for this type of automation, take the time to configure it so you don’t annoy your followers by promoting posts that are off-season or are out-of-date, or by posting too often, and to engage properly on each platform you use. Otherwise, you’ll get very little value from this.

If you can’t or don’t want to install a plugin, there’s no reason you can’t share links to your older posts using a scheduling app like Buffer or Hootsuite.

Refresh and Renew

Some things do change. Maybe you wrote a really great post a few years ago, but some of the information is now out of date. There’s absolutely no reason not to take that post, remove the parts that are obsolete, and replace them with something new and fresh. But instead of keeping it buried in your archives, delete the old one and publish the revised edition as a brand new post.

The best way to manage this process is with the Yoast Duplicate Post plugin. Its Rewrite & Republish feature allows you to create a working copy of an existing post which you can edit and reschedule for a later date. The existing post will remain live until the new one is published.

Create a Compilation

Once you’ve been blogging for several years, there’s a good chance that you’ve touched on similar subjects from time to time. For example, perhaps every year you’ve written a post about getting organized for back to school, or getting organized for the holidays. This year, instead of scratching your head to come up with some new ideas, make it easy on yourself and make a list of your previous articles, with the titles linked to the original posts. Most readers won’t have seen them the first time, and those that did aren’t likely to remember and will probably enjoy reading them again.

Build a Book

Do you ever read your own blog and think, “This is great stuff. It’s too bad I couldn’t sell it!” Who says you can’t?

Much of the material in Geralin Thomas’ book, From Hoarding to Hope: Understanding People Who Hoard and How To Help Them, originally appeared on her blog. The same is true of Beth L. Buelow’s Insight: Reflections on the Gifts of Being an Introvert and probably a lot more books than we even realize.

Learn how to turn your blog into an e-book.

Create a Course

Years ago, ProBlogger Darren Rowse published a series of blog posts that made up a month-long challenge to his readers. He then packaged them as a downloadable e-book and sold tens of thousands of copies before he converted it to an online course called 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.

These are just a few of the ways you can repurpose your blog content. What others can you think of? Join the conversation by leaving a comment below!

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