The arrival of 2020 marks the Year of the Rat, and according to Chinese lunar mythology, the rat symbolises quick wits and resourcefulness. If you’re like us and run a blog regularly, coming up with new post ideas can quickly become a stressful ordeal. However, what if we told you that you could refurbish your old posts (or parts of them) to generate new content? Join Wordsmith this Year of the Rat and let’s explore how we can repurpose old material!
Branching and expanding
Have you ever written an article where you felt like a point hadn’t been fully fleshed out enough? Whether due to word count restrictions or the abundance of points to explain, not thoroughly going over each point or providing inadequate examples with it creates a sense of dissatisfaction for both readers and writers alike.
Break free from the restrictions by making a new article centred around the underexplained point! We’ve done this in the past whilst going over imagery in romance. Imagery that speaks to the senses is a great way to create compelling copy, and it’d be unfair to only talk about it in a romantic context – so we created a series of articles that covered imagery across the five senses.
Listicles are also great contenders worth breaking apart and exploring in greater detail. It’s a tactic that’s especially popular amongst travel blogs. First they create a list of the hottest destinations to visit in the coming seasons, and attach a limited list of attractions (usually three or so) to each of these locations. Obviously there’s a lot more to see and do, but the blogger has to pay in mind that putting in too many attractions for every destination would overload the piece – making it a pain to navigate for readers only interested in one section and overbearing for casual readers.
Instead, the clever blogger would add a clickthrough link for each destination to provide a more in-depth look at the local attractions. It’s effective, provides plenty of things to write about and gives visitors a reason to hang around your site even longer!
Consolidating the fundamentals
Over the months (or years) of articles that you have written, you’re bound to have points that overlap between multiple articles. For us at least, you’ll find that copy conciseness or the value of creating a customised customer experience to be at the core of many of our articles. At a glance, having the same themes repeatedly can appear rather redundant, but it does make you a bit of a (self-proclaimed) expert on that particular subject – more importantly, it allows you to explore the variety of contexts that the themes can be applied in.
Using conciseness as an example, there’s much more to discuss beyond how to write a concise message – including headings and subheads, call-to-action, statistics and facts, the all-important hook and more – all of which can benefit from brevity. Having covered several of these across various articles, we could aggregate the points together under one handy post – removing the need to skim through our blog archives to find the relevant tips (look out for a handy conciseness guide in the future!) When making such guides, remember that they need to be easy to digest, meaning that lengthy explanations or rationales should be avoided where possible. Here’s what you need for each point:
· A subhead
· Why people should care about it
· How to do it
· An example of it in action (if you’re feeling generous or if word count allows)
Furthermore, you could also consider having your points converted into a vibrant infographic to spice up the presentation – SEO and online marketing guru Neil Patel would approve!
A play on perspective
We like to think that after we talk about something, it’s a done deal and it should never be talked about again until far into the distant future. While rehashing content without a sufficient twist can be considered lazy, what if you could do it somewhere else? Enter the “evil twin” technique – courtesy of Orbit Media Studios.
To do this, you need to find another website willing to accept a guest article from you – this can be anywhere from contributing to a fellow blogger’s page to a news site open to external editorials or op-eds (here’s a list of the things you need to look out for when doing this). After agreeing on the direction of the piece, simply take one of your old articles pertaining to the direction and rewrite it from the opposite perspective.
For example, we previously wrote about the “5 reasons why blogging should be part of your content marketing strategy” and explained how it would drive traffic and humanise brands. To convert this article into an evil twin, the title would become “5 reasons why nonblogging brands are less effective” and the prior points twisted to highlight the unoptimized traffic flow or the lack of humanity and brand appeal. Last but not least, the guest post will include a link that traces back to our own blog or website.
Since you already have a clear outline (in the form of your original article), you only have to tweak your arguments and find new supporting information to justify those claims. It’s a rather brilliant strategy that is not only lighter on your workload (relative to writing a new article from scratch), but it also attracts external readership and hopefully new subscribers. Provided you did a good job, the collaborating site may be happy to host more pieces from you in the future as well!
The great writer Mark Twain once wrote, “there is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.” Taking old blogs and creatively repurposing them very much falls under such a category. Being resourceful and taking shortcuts isn’t cheating – provided you give your mental kaleidoscope enough of a twist!