How to recycle your content
In a world that is constantly demanding your attention, businesses and organizations are stepping up to create content for their audience to consume. Sometimes, it can be exhausting to keep coming up with new stuff every day, week, year. Here’s a trick that the most seasoned of content marketers are doing: recycling content. Not being able to keep up with content demands is not a reflection on you, your team or your organization. This stuff is hard! There are people whose only job is content creation and they do that for 8 hours a day/5 days a week. Recycling is just a way to work smarter, not harder.
You already have some great content that your audience loves, it’s just time to tweak it. Recycling content is pretty much that: taking old content you’ve made, giving it an update and turning it into something new. For example, taking a popular blog post and turning it into an infographic.
Recycling content is cost-effective too. That’s either one person or a whole team that can move to something else instead of sitting and brainstorming new ideas. Keeping within time and budget constraints is crucial for a nonprofit, so recycling can be your perfect secret weapon. Here is how you can recycle your already-amazing content.
Pick Your Best-Performing Pieces
You don’t need fancy analytics software to determine what your audience loves most about your content. If you’re an organization or business on social, most platforms already provide insights for you to view. Your website host site often will have basic analytics or insights for you to look at as well.
Find the posts/images/articles with the most clicks or views and make a list. You can even find your top visited pages on your website. There’s your subject matter. You may even already have the written content to use on those pieces.
Also, don’t be afraid to use old content too. This is an opportunity to update it or follow-up. Is it an outdated blog post? Great, add a paragraph at the beginning to share how things have changed. Maybe they are older statistics, that’s fine. Now is your chance to take those and show growth to your audience. No content is off limits.
Get Creative
Here is your chance to get a little creative. You’re not wasting your brain power on creating new content anymore, it’s already there! Now is the time to mix it up. So here are some ideas on how to convert your content to make it work harder for you:
- Turn an old blog post into an infographic
- Switch a review on Facebook into a quote graphic for Instagram
- Convert a podcast into a video to share or vice versa
- Update an old webpage into a blog post
- Have a presentation with lots of stats? Create infographics
Share Your “New” Content
Here’s the key to recycling your content: share the daylights out of it. Promote your work! You already spent the time and energy to develop new content, but now you’ve got shiny, “new” content to show off. You can even go farther by posting a link from the old content to the new content. Don’t be afraid to make your content work for you!
Eileen Asher is an experienced graphic designer and digital marketer, with over 6 years in the field. Driven by equity, she takes pride in providing excellent design and marketing to organizations doing good work to benefit all. To see more of her work, check out her website.
Originally published at https://eileenasher.com on February 2, 2021.
