Maintaining a blog isn’t easy, even if you have decades of experience that you can share. There are only so many topics that your audience cares about, and only so many ways to talk about those topics.

Let’s be honest – how many different ways can you say the same thing? Even I struggle to find new topics and new ways to elaborate on them, and I get paid to write creatively!

So how do you – as a small business owner, entrepreneur, or volunteer for a non-profit – find ways to share new, fresh blog posts? One easy technique is to reuse old material. You don’t necessarily want to repost all of last year’s posts verbatim, but here are some tips for recycling that information so you don’t have to start from scratch each time:

1. Reorganize Your Lists: Did you write some top-ten lists last year? Take a look at those to see if you can create a new top-ten list that includes some of those tricks. Or maybe you wrote about several similar topics that you can condense into a new top-ten list. Or you can make a list of your most popular top-ten lists! (Don’t forget to include backlinks.)
2. Create a Series: Remember those posts about a similar topic? Try posting them again in the same week/month, but as part of a series. Give each post a quick, new introduction, then end it with a line that will lead in to the next post. Not only are you reusing previously published material, but by organizing it into a series you’ll help your readers see the connection between topics.
3. Give It a Good Edit: Look back to some of your earliest posts. Chances are good that you’ve grown as a writer or a professional since you wrote it, and you’ll see ways to improve the post (either grammatically, or because you found a better, new way to do something). If you change more than 50% of the material, you can comfortably consider it a new post entirely. If you change less than that, simply add Revised to the end of the title so your readers will know there’s new material included.
4. Add an Infographic: Do you have a post that includes a lot of statistics and numbers? Why not put those statistics into an infographic? You can add to the remaining content to fill in the blank spaces if needed, and the infographic will give your readers something eye-catching to share on social media.

Using these four strategies will help you fill in your calendar this year without having to create dozens of new blog posts – that’s time you can spend elsewhere!

What tricks have you found that help you create/reuse content?

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