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The following is a guest post by William Sarto. William Sarto is a marketer and content strategist. He shares his knowledge and experience in his articles based on current marketing trends. He is passionate about all new techniques and methods appearing in digital marketing. Stay tuned via twitter orG+.

Your site, blog or social network group probably have a lot or at least some posts that you are proud of. These posts did well with the audience, bringing them useful information and teaching them something. You probably remember these posts as ABC as they brought lots of comments and shares.

Leaving such content to get dusty is an impermissible waste.

That is why the idea of the repeated usage of content is definitely a great one.

You can breathe life into your best content and keep getting new (and old) people coming to your site. Changing a way of presentation, you create new value for the content, and there is no need to throw away great posts to the archive.

Using old content again has many advantages. Here are some of them:

• You save time. Time is a very valuable resource on the Internet. As you know, you need quite a lot of time and skills to create great content. By reshaping the old content, you save time on not creating new texts.
• SEO impulse. Concentrating a part of your content on one topic can be beneficial for keywords promotion.
• Involving new audience. In many cases, original content attracts the interest of only one group of people. Changing your content can make a new audience interested.
• Reinforcement of your message. Repetition is an integral part of bringing old content to life. It will make people hear your ideas again and maybe do something (to buy your product, for example).
• Getting reputation. Publishing quality content on one topic in several places can make you more visible and recognizable in your sphere.

So, now you know why you may want to use old content for new publications. Now let’s get to how you can do it. The following are 10 ways you can bring new life to your old content.

An improved version

Many of you have probably noticed words such as “new improved product (recipe, mix, etc.)” on your favorite yogurt bottle, chocolate or cereal box. Of course, most of the times, the product itself doesn’t change much; these are just small alterations that many people wouldn’t even notice if it wasn’t for the bright and interesting cover. This marketing technique seems to work quite well.

You can use the same method with all the types of content, too. An improved version of the old article, for example, can attract people to the site again. Improve your content in any way and maybe it’ll be a hit again.

Old content for new people

A drastic growth of site visitors, subscribers or followers in social media is a devout wish of any content marketing specialist. Situations when the number of Facebook followers, for example, increase from 1 million to 2 million in a month are quite rare, but you still should keep such possibility in mind.

So, what to do, if your social media account gets a big number of new followers? In this case, you should sort your archive out. You can reanimate “green” content or use the old news posts timing them to yearly events:

“You are probably looking forward to visiting the big music festival this weekend. Let’s remember how it was last year…”

Write new content based on the old one

Until the last year, I didn’t know that TV series Frasier was a spin-off of Cheers. The both shows are great, but it happened so that one came out thanks to another.

The same method can be used for your content. High-quality content can come out of some other quality blog post. And people might like the both. One of the examples is to turn a popular list post into a series of posts. For that, you need to take one of your list posts and make every point into a separate post. It will give you an opportunity to get deeper into the topic and to tell more about some things that didn’t get into the original post.

An idea of making a list post into several separate posts can work backward, too. You can group 5-7 posts into one article. It is especially suitable if you post many articles quite often; it’s a great way to create more complicated content and remind your readers of several posts at once. Here is an example of an epic blog series from Tim Urban.

Create slides

Interesting statistics, deep quotes, helpful tips, etc. put on slides are a great and easy way to bring new life into your content. You can share these slides in social networks, which is also good for marketing.

It is quite easy to create such slides with the help of free graphic editing services. Many of them have ready to go templates of pictures for blogs and social networks. Here is an example of the easy way of showing information on a slide from The Social Ms blog:

Build infographics

Another way of refreshing your content is an infographic that can contain your entire post or some parts of it. If there is a lot of data in your post, an infographic is a great way of organizing it and break the article into basic theses. Infographic is a great thing when you struggle with writer’s block as you don’t even have to create anything new; you just take your old posts and breathe new colorful life in them.

Refresh old articles and post them again

If you look through your blog, you’ll probably find many interesting posts that may seem outdated because of a couple of stale aspects. Times are changing and even the most informative and detailed posts may become not quite accurate in a couple of months.

In such case, you can reshape this content creating a new article. Change the content so that people can see the progress. You may even leave the most of the text untouched altering only a couple of ideas. When you publish such post, add a small note at the beginning telling about the origin of the post.

Post again or promote articles in social networks

Another great plus of topical content is that you can share it and promote through social media as successfully as when it was firstly published. It may seem illogical to promote the same content to the same audience, but in practice, many people miss many things when they are firstly published or shared and gladly accept it in some time.

Create an everyday email mailing

Sometimes content, even one deeply researched article or series of similar articles can be easily divided into pieces that are perfect as everyday newsletters. For example, this very article that you are reading. Every tip or suggestion from it can be sent in a separate letter if you vivify it with a couple of more examples, pictures, and information. The base for mailing for 10 days is read; thus, you make your content live longer.

Write a book

You can expand your content and create an e-book. It is quite a logical step; many great books were born this way. It is especially great for those whose sites or blogs are dedicated to mainly one niche or theme.

If you also decide to create a book based on your posts, work on searching the additional information and make some researches. Add pictures. Make people want to buy this book. You can make it yourself or hire a team of designers so that it looks more professional.

The length of your book can be different depending on the topics you want to cover and their depth. Analyze other similar books and you’ll get the point. There are numerous tools that you can use for making an e-book from your blog.

When you create a book, you can also use it to enlarge the base of your followers or subscribers. E-books have a reputation of a quality content that is useful to readers in any way. Use the book any possible way you can: hand it round, give it as a gift for your subscribers, offer for sale, etc.

Write a guest post. Or two (or three, or four…)

Quality content can give you new ideas, stories, articles for your blog as well as bring you new readers. Many very cool sites accept quality guest posts that can bring you traffic, sometimes a lot of traffic.

New posts for guest posting don’t have to be tightly coupled with the original posts. You can even hire writers or ask someone to make a short rendering of original post adding new information and facts to make the content new and fresh.

So, reshaping your content can save you lots of time. It is a great technique that can be useful for SEO, getting a new audience and many other purposes. You can think in advance about how you’ll change and reshape your content, as one story can be a great ground for many kinds of other content.

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