Recycle Your Blog

Guest contributor Chris Brogan says:

If you’ve been fortunate enough to write your blog for any length of time, I can almost guarantee that you have posts from the early days that people haven’t seen that are still relevant. It’s not that they might be the best thing you’ve ever written, but they can still be of value.

For instance, I wrote If I Started Today back in November of 2008. It’s still valid. Almost 3 years later, I’d do pretty much the same thing. So, that makes it a post worth resharing. But how? And what can I do to make it interesting for you to visit?

Recycle Your Blog

There are a few ways to recycle your blog. Way number one is to pull out information from a post you want to share, expound on it until it’s a standalone post, and then link to the original post at the end. So, in this case, if I wanted to do that with “If I Started Today,” I’d write up a section about “Five Elements Your Blog Needs When Starting Out,” and then I’d link to the post at the bottom to show what else you need by pointing to that post.

The other way to recycle posts is to group them up with a post that tells a story through sharing more than one post. At this point, I’ve written about 8 or 9 posts talking about Google+. I could write a post called “My Best Advice on Google+” and put links to those posts all in one place. This would give my readers a simple way to walk through everything I’d written about the topic, and it would give me much more attention on the site, without having had to write a new post of any size or value.

Recycling Is Good For Everyone

Recycling some of your older material so that people can get something out of it is helpful. But just like you see on products that use recycled materials, you probably want to always maintain a mix of new material and post-use recycled material. And you never want to flat out reprint your posts, as that is frowned upon by Google.

So, with that in mind, look back on your blog and find some posts worth sharing again. Who knows? You might find a hit the second time around with something that went unnoticed through no fault of your own.

Maybe you’ll make some art from trash.

This article appeared originally on Chris Brogan's blog. You can view the original post here: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/recycle-your-blog/.