Recycling Your Content: The Purpose Of Repurposing

November 7, 2022

These days, recycling is not just a trend. It’s a lifestyle, a requirement, a duty of modern living. We recycle everything, from clothes to crayons, to carpets. We recycle things we probably shouldn’t.

So, why would we not think to recycle our own work?
No really.
Hear me out.

We are all for keepin’ it fresh, but we can spend hours penning posts only to have them skim-read by a digital society whose eyes (and interest) dart fast. This is the new normal, granted, but there seems to be an element of waste.

Why waste matters – even in the ever-expanding wastes of the Internet

Way back in 2015, a brand-building company called Buffer tried a funky experiment called the “No New Content” challenge. In a nutshell, they stopped producing new content and refreshed their existing stuff, two or three times a week for one month.

The result? Organic search traffic grew by 4%!

This big, bold blog experiment proved that there’s nothing lazy about recycling (which you will already know if you spend as much time separating your paper from your plastics as I do).

And with half the work already done, you will save some time . . . and there is nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all wrong with taking that time to take a walk, read a book, trawl TikTok, or change your identity and fly you to the moon.

Revise. Reshare. Recycle. Refresh.

Just like committing to a Spring-clean Saturday, revisiting your work can be daunting/irritating/tedious-beyond-measure, and there is a strong chance you will CRINGE as though you were listening to your own voice on video or looking at a photo of yourself as a gawky teen.

But everything is relevant to a moment in time. And with the passage of time, comes new ideas. (Who wrote that?)

Never is this more true than when it comes to your business blog.

There will be some gems lurking in there – if you put in the effort back in the day. But do they still belong? And would they benefit from being uncovered, repolished and presented, sparkling, to a new and admiring audience?

The purpose of repurposing

The whole point of content is to move users down your sales funnel. And it starts with being found. Google (for example) ranks search results based on a number of factors, including the relevance and quality of content. Read that again.

Repurposing content isn’t just sharing an old post on a new platform. You’ve got to make some effort. Like:

• update with new, relevant data
• add key statistics
• include leadership quotes
• make an infographic
• embed a video
• convert it into a podcast

Don’t start over, start here

Some blog posts performed dazzlingly well in the past. Remember the ones with lotsa social shares and traffic? By giving those fusty articles a new lease of life, you’ll reach new audiences, and reinforce the message you were trying to get out there in the first place.

So, about your old content: is it still doing its job . . . or it is loitering outside the disco smoking and glaring? Can it do better?