Ressurect Old Content

Rank and tank.  That is the nature of blog content on the Internet.  Most blog posts are destined to have a few shining weeks in the search engines and then disappear into your archives never to be heard from again.

This unfortunate truth makes it necessary to consistently create great content for your readership.  This can be especially difficult when that content is always being created from scratch.

But,  if you leverage the content that you have already created, you will be able to squeeze out a bit more mileage.

Instead of giving up on that great content you created, resurrect it by giving it a fresh look and distributing it through a different channel.

Here are 7 ways you can effectively re-purpose that long forgotten content.

Blog posts to EzineArticles

Dust off a long forgotten post and rewrite it for distribution through the free and popular article submission site EzineArticles.com.   Give the article a fresh title and include a link back to your site in the by-line.

I have found that these articles can rank fairly well in the search engines as EzineArticles.com has now cracked my Top 10 referring sites after only running this strategy for two months.

The second benefit of this strategy is that people will occasionally use the content from EzineArticles.com on their own blog or email newsletter. This can provide additional referral traffic and will build links back to your site.

Blog posts to Email Newsletter

Creating great content for your blog is difficult enough and now it is time, once again, to put out your email newsletter.  Consider grabbing a couple of old posts and rewriting them for your email recipients.  You can include an excerpt of the post and link to it on your blog or include the whole post in the email.

I use AWeber’s “Blog Broadcast” option to aggregate two weeks of posts into an email and send it out to my subscribers.  I will typically begin the email by highlighting one post that I felt was particularly good.  I will typically see a spike in traffic on these posts after my newsletter is sent.

Video to iTunes Vodcast

Are you creating video content on your blog?  If so, upload it to iTunes as a video podcast.

I use the popular blip.tv video sharing site to automatically sync to my iTunes account.  You will need to have a Pro account ($8.00 per month) for Blip.tv to convert to an iTunes compatible video.  However, even a free Blip.tv account will do all of the uploading to iTunes for you if your video is already compatible.

If you are regularly creating video, you will begin to see a traffic increase due to the vodcast subscribers you gain on iTunes.

How To and List Posts to Slideshare

Slideshare is awesome and Google seems to agree, judging by the numerous Top 10 search results I have seen for slideshare presentations.

It’s a fairly simple idea, upload PowerPoint presentations into your Slideshare account just as you would a video into YouTube.  The presentation can include audio to give it the power of a webinar.

The presentation is also embeddable, which allows you to place it on your site and allows others to do the same.

List posts and how-to posts are good candidates when re-purposing to PowerPoint presentations.

Blog Posts to TubeMogul

Got a webcam?  Dig up one of your old posts and turn that sucker on.

Some good, short (1 to 3 minute) head shot video of you discussing the content of the blog post should be created and uploaded through TubeMogul.

Tube Mogul allows you to upload your video to dozens of video sharing sites (including YouTube) at one time.  And, it’s free.

The default video sharing sites in Tube Mogul are:

• YouTube
• Daily Motion
• MetaCafe
• Yahoo Video
• Blip.tv
• Veoh
• i2TV

You will simply need to create an account with these video sharing sites and store them in Tube Mogul. Tube Mogul also provides a one-stop interface to view the analytics for your video across all of the video sharing sites you are targeting.

And don’t forget to embed this new video post to your own blog with a paragraph or two of supporting text!

Blog Posts to Tweets

If you’re like me, you can’t spend every minute of your day sending out Twitter messages.  Chunk up one of those great articles you wrote at the beginning of 2009 and schedule out your tweets using a service like HootSuite.

I am not suggesting that you completely automate your Twitter messages, as you will not get any benefit out of this.  However, I have found that I am able to continue the discussion with people on Twitter when it is convenient for me to do so, rather than having to monitor and update Twitter all throughout the day.

Blog Posts To Downloadable Report

If you have been blogging for a while on your topic, you will be able to pull together a free report that can be downloaded from your website.  You can either ask for an email newsletter sign-up in exchange for the report, charge for the report, or give it away for for free.

The fewer barriers you place between a visitor and your free report, the more likely it is to go viral.  Free reports tend to get emailed, tweeted about and mentioned on other blogs often, which will bring in more links and traffic to your blog.

What about you?  How do you breathe new life into long forgotten content?  What advice do you have for those of us that are on the Content Treadmill?

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