You want people to read and share your content but lives are busy. They may not even notice, lack immediate interest or forget. When you recycle content, you help them re-discover what you’ve already done.
1. Build To Last
To warrant future attention, your content needs to last. You can write about something which is of the moment but for similar effort, you can write something with future appeal too.You may need to explain the interconnections.
For instance, my recent post about whether it’s better to pre-announce or ship compares strategies at Apple, Blackberry, Google and Microsoft. Blackberry had just announced they were for sale, which made the post timely. There are still ways to refer back to this post years later. Perhaps a company will have disappeared or changed strategies.
2. Build To Find
If your content is easy to find with a web search, you increase the chances of rediscovery with no further action from you (e.g., case study). You can’t count on this though.You help with rediscovery when you embed links in your new content. I put links throughout my posts and at the bottom too. This allows readers to easily click to read something else (though not all links are to content I’ve created).
3. Build To Share
Content is easiest to share when all that’s needed is a click of a button. Social networks are your friend. You expand your reach when you have already built audiences on them. A newsletter is another mechanism, though sharing is often more complicated.You may like creating PDFs, but they are awkward to read on a smartphone, consume bandwidth and take up storage space. Copy/pasting can be a hassle too. How do you track readership? Instead, you could put highlights in an easy-to-share-and-track blog post with links to the PDF.
Examples
When I write a blog post, here are the steps for initial readership- automatic tweet
- manual posting on Google+
- manual update on LinkedIn
- inclusion in a monthly newsletter
This is Life Insurance Awareness Month. My new post about Boomer Esiason has links to timeless posts about prior spokespeople like Buddy Valastro, Lamar Odom and Leslie Bibb.
When there's a major storm, I've got ready-to-go content about inaccurate weather forecasts or snow plows or power failures or the aftermath.
As you create more content, you'll see more connections between what’s happening and you’ve already got. That creates more opportunities to recycle.
