The Art of Recycling Your Content

If you’re a blogger then you know that creating new content can be tough, at some times. Problems like writer’s block are not uncommon in the blogging world.

There are some clever ways of fighting writer’s block, like: having a bank of idea, setting fixed hours for writing, stealing other people’s ideas, and so on. However, today I want to propose an approach that’s a little different.

This simple advice is not about how to get new ideas for content, it’s about how to reuse the content you already have and present it in a completely new form.

Start with with a post

What you do in the beginning is pretty straightforward, you have to start with a standard blog post. And by standard blog post I mean something that’s actually useful and valuable to your audience.

You can use one of your past posts, or create a completely new one. Either approach works equally as good.

Turn it into a video

Start by creating an outline describing the post. Take all the most important points (sub-headlines) from the post, launch a tool like Microsoft PowerPoint, create a new presentation, and create one slide for each sub-headline.

The slides don’t have to feature anything other that the sub-headline itself. You can also use some pictures, but it’s not a must.

What I don’t advise you to do, however, is to place the actual body of your post on your presentation. This won’t look good at all.

So what do you need this presentation for, right?

Now you can install a screen-recording software like Camtasia (or other similar), and use the presentation as the background of your video. You just start your presentation and record your voice-over while the slides change in the background.

Once you have the video you can publish it on YouTube and additionally create another post notifying your audience about the video. Some people simply prefer to consume content in a video form rather than anything else.

Besides, the video can bring you additional visitors directly from YouTube. Just don’t forget to include a link back to your site in the video’s description.

Take just the audio

When you have the video ready you can go back to your screen-recording software and save it as an MP3 file. Such audio-only version can then be submitted as a podcast to one of the popular podcasting directories or shared as a direct download on your site.

Audio is still a great way of delivering content. People can listen to audio files almost anywhere, while video requires a more peaceful environment.

And again, when you publish your audio as a podcast you can attract new visitors that wouldn’t have found your site otherwise.

Combine posts

The final step is to take a number of your posts and combine them into one big package of content.

The whole trick is to choose only content that is relevant and would look good as a package. For example, posts that touch upon one topic, but focus on different aspects of the issue, and so on.

Now, I’m not telling you to take this package and simply republish it again. The trick is to create a PDF e-book with it or some other form of digital publication. Such an e-book can then be used as a gift for your email subscribers, or as a bribe to bring new subscribers through the door.

There are probably hundreds of other ideas on how to recycle content, but I’m sure that implementing just the three explained here will keep you occupied for a long time.

However, feel free to share if you know of any other interesting ways of recycling content. I’m looking forward to seeing your insights.

Karol K. is a writer, passionate about blogging and online business. He is part of ThemeFuse – the leading provider of premium WordPress themes.