How to Reclaim Your Old, Archived Blog Posts
How to Reclaim Your Old, Archived Blog Posts
There are a growing number of people who have been writing blogs posts for a decade or more. If you’ve been doing it five days a week for 10 years, you’ve created 2,600 blog posts. If each of those blog posts were 500 words, you’ve written 1.3 million words. Wow! That’s a lot of content.
The nerd in me wonders just how many nuggets of wisdom are buried in the ominous archived section of your blog. It seems an incredible waste of time and creativity if the content you share is only used once. Surely there is a way to breathe new life into your latent blog post content. Don’t you agree?
Content Is an Asset. but Your Ability to Cash Out Its Value Depends On Your Willingness to Reimagine New Ways You Might Use It.
Your continued investment in developing and distributing great content only increases your value as a brand, business, or cause. That means it’s costing you big time if you only leave your blog posts in their current state. Some of our best ideas slip into our writing and thinking when we least expect it. And sometimes we don’t think something is significant until others point it out to us.
But getting started is always the hard part. Just like blogging became a discipline for you over time so should reviewing, categorizing, and evaluating existing content for other distribution channels. The key is to look for similar titles, themes, or areas of focus you can link together to use to produce something in a different format.
You Likely Have Existing Content You Can Use In a Variety of Different Ways.
It may mean you need to rewrite it, update the research you originally used, or stitch together smaller posts into a more substantial piece. Either way, you have a ton of raw material that is waiting for you to use in new and creative ways.
To jump-start your thinking, here are 10 things you should consider doing to reclaim your latent blog post content:
Create an online video series. Use the blog posts as the basis of a script.
Publish an eBook. You can do this with as little as 5,000 to 7,500 words.
Design a workshop. Organize a collection of posts into a daylong learning experience.
Write a traditional, full-length book. You may not have all the words you need immediately, but you might have enough to create a book proposal or, at least, a solid outline.
Compose an eCourse. Reassemble your blog posts into an automated email series that can be self-managed.
Outline a keynote address. Oral communication is still a very powerful way to share ideas. Some people hear things differently than when they read them.
Record a podcast. Take your most popular posts and turn them into a great panel discussion with a small group of interesting people.
Send out a press release. Look for a news-related events or stories to tag with your idea. It works!
Host a webinar. Online education is hot right now. If you thought the subject or idea was important to blog about, it can likely help someone else solve a very practical problem.
Brainstorm industry publications who might republish your original post in an extended form. Send a blog post to an editor with thoughts about how you will expand it and why it’s right for their publication. Editors are always looking for good content.
Some of Your Best Ideas Are Sitting In Your Archives Waiting to Be Activated for New Channels of Content Distribution.
Just because you posted it once doesn’t mean everyone read it, printed it out, and placed it on on the refrigerator door for future reference. It’s highly likely they forgot about it as fast as you hit the “publish” button.
How will you reclaim the existing content on your blog?
Ben Stroup is Chief Growth Architect and President at Velocity Strategy Solutions where he helps leaders design, develop, and deploy smarter business growth strategies. Ben is a futurist, disruptor, and data champion. He leads a team that takes a structured learning approach to business challenges, which allows them to assist leaders in bridging the gap between ideas, innovation, and revenue—taking ideas from mind to market.
Velocity Strategy Solutions is an on-demand, next-generation business strategy and management consulting firm which provides clients with a relentless focus on data, execution, and results that positively impact the bottom line. Velocity delivers integrated people and revenue strategies combined with a disciplined approach to growth architecture that elevates the capacity of leaders, teams, and organizations to succeed and win more.