Recycling Old Blog Posts for New Content

When I started blogging, I had a million-and-one blog posts swirling around in my head at any given time. It seemed the ideas would never dry up. Fast-forward 4 years, and I found myself struggling to compose one good one a week. It may have been caused by the (false) notion that everything under the sun had already been written, or it may have just been the overwhelming prospect of coming up with the next great blog post.

It got hard. And it became a struggle.

So what do you do when you fall into those times of writing drought; when the ideas no longer flow, or even trickle?

If you’ve been blogging for any length of time, you already have a stockpile of topics sitting on your blog.

Not only does revisiting old posts help generate new post ideas, but it allows new readers to become familiar with some of your older postings.

Some ideas for making your old posts new again:

• Revisit what you’ve written in the past and freshen it up. Write a completely new post, based on the original (be sure to link to it) and update it with new information and statistics. Or include excerpts from it, and use those excerpts as a starting point for explaining any new views or positions and why they have/haven’t changed due to new evidence/support/data.

• Rewrite old content to address current/relevant events. You may have a fantastic post that stands completely on its own, but it’s buried under a mountain of old posts. Use current events as a reason to revisit the post. Write a brief summary of how a particular current event relates and simply link back to your post within it.

• Have you written a post in the past that targets a certain audience? Why not use the same topic and write a post that is relevant to an entirely different one.

• Create a roundup of some of your favorite posts. Usually this is a great way to end the year, but it can work during the year, on a smaller scale. Writing a post to highlight posts that may have been overlooked in recent weeks, creates another opportunity for readers to see and connect with them.

Blogging does require dedication and thought, but coming up with new posts doesn’t always require completely new thoughts. The ones you’ve already written can be some of your best springboards.