Question: Do you need to write a new blog post every day?

 Answer: Not if you know how to effectively re-use your existing content. 

To establish yourself as subject matter expert you will spend a good deal of time writing blog posts, creating slides for seminars, recording podcasts and videos and assembling white papers. You won’t establish your authority with one or two pieces of information on the subject since both readers and search engines are looking for substantial proof.

Here is the challenge. You know the work is important but it is exhausting to keep coming up with new angles on the same subject. And, since most content has a lifespan of only a few days. it is vital to find ways to get a little extra mileage from the best of what you have created.

How do you do it without boring loyal fans? Even with large followings on social platforms and a steady stream of visitors to your website, only a fraction of your community will see an individual piece of content. So, employ strategies to reuse and recycle information to reach a wider audience, without reinventing the wheel. Here a few of my favorite tricks.

Create a round up post –  Link to several related posts, images, and podcast episodes. Even your most loyal fans don’t read your content every day. They are sure to have missed a few things. Roundups give them a chance to catch up on what they missed.

Be sure to give your readers a mixture of new and old. When you create a list of links, don’t just pull an excerpt from the original post, write a new description. This will help you avoid any duplicate content issues and it prevents your summary post from being nothing more than a stream of links.

These posts become pillar content helping search engines find related information and give you the authority recognition you deserve.

Send an email wrap up. If you have built your email list carefully over time, it is probably significantly larger than the average number of visitors to your website. People are busy. Deliver your best content to them so they don’t have to come to you.

Give your content a second chance. Sometimes a video or blog post flops. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t good, maybe it was just a timing issue. Wait a week or two, and try re-sharing it at different times, with different key words. Not everything will be a hit right out of the gate. Some content takes time to build an audience.

Create a calendar and use it to schedule your content. It is easy to see the last time you created content on a related topic. If you don’t have enough new information to write a completely new post, update the old one and reshare it. This works really well on posts that were popular to begin with.

Create a compilation or white paper. Pull together your top posts into a Word document, add a table of contents, an introduction and a cover. Next create a landing page and a download form. Use your content summary to build your email list.

Try a new media. Record a podcast or shoot a video using the content of the blog post as your outline. Some people will enjoy reading, while others want to take information with them on the go. Don’t forget to post a transcript in the blog post to make the content searchable.

Looking for more content ideas? Check out our Content Based SEO workshop

Looking for more information on this topic?

Check out what’s new in the toolbox: