7 Easy Ways To Turn Old Content Into New Content

Posted in Blogging, Tips, Web Design • 512 days ago • Written by Ryan Taft • 6 Comments

Do you use Content Marketing as a strategy for increasing website traffic? If so, then you know just how valuable content marketing can be for a website owner. The one negative that comes with content marketing is that it’s time consuming creating valuable content that your audience will want to consume. Not only does it take time to create valuable online content, but many website owners also have a hard time coming up with new content ideas. This article is meant to provide you with 7 ideas for turning existing content into new content.

1. Turn Blog Comments into New Blog Articles

Do the readers of your blog actively leave insightful comments? The best blogs are the ones that engage readers so much that they are compelled to leave a comment after reading the article. Many times readers bring up a point that the author may have missed. Other times readers challenge something in the article and bring up an opposing viewpoint that makes for a good discussion. Every once in a while, (depending on how many comments you get on your blog) a reader will leave a comment that the blog author can use to write an entirely new blog article.

If while reading your blog comments you come across one that sparks an idea for a new blog article, here’s how you should go about the process:

• Take time to think about your idea and make sure it’s valuable enough to write about
• Contact the author of the comment to seek his/her permission to write an article based on his/her comment
• Write the article and provide credit to the person who left the original comment that sparked your idea
• Send a link to the article to the author of the comment to let him/her see how the article turned out

2. Transform Ebooks into Blog Articles

Ebooks are fantastic marketing tools for website owners. Ebooks can provide the following benefits:

• Provide valuable information on a specific subject to your audience
• Allow you to provide more details than you normally would if you simply wrote a blog article on the topic
• Great for SEO
• Position the author as an expert on the subject matter
• Can be used as an offer for collecting information from your audience (ie. Provide me with your name and email address to download our free eBook)

As you can see, if you haven’t already written a few eBooks, you might want to get started. Another benefit that eBooks can provide website owners is turning existing content into new content. Once an eBook has been published for a period of time you can then start to turn sections of the eBook into blog articles. Obviously you don’t want to use the copy verbatim, but you can take certain areas of the eBook, expand on them, and publish them to your blog. If you want to turn your eBooks into blog articles, here’s how you should go about doing so:

• Re-read your eBook to find what sections might make for interesting blog articles – look for areas that can be expanded on or sections where something in the industry may have changed, thus you can update the information and re-publish it as a blog article, etc.
• Break out each section that you want to turn into an article and come up with a title for the article
• Start writing – Either expand on the topic or modify the existing content
• Optimize the new article for Search and publish it to your blog

3. LinkedIn Discussions Become Blog Articles

Have you ever participated in a LinkedIn Group Discussion? LinkedIn Groups are a great place for interacting with people who share similar interests on a given topic. Within LinkedIn Groups any group member can start a discussion on any topic related to the overall group topic. For example, if you were in a marketing group on LinkedIn, you might start a LinkedIn discussion about the latest Twitter features or foursquare marketing strategies, etc. Once the discussion is started anyone in the group can leave a comment with their opinion on the discussion topic. The result is an open dialogue about a certain topic. Most people usually leave it there. Creative website owners use LinkedIn discussions to generate ideas for new blog articles.

During LinkedIn discussions ultimately someone brings up a point or makes a comment that lends itself nicely to being expanded upon. For you creative website owners, this is the opportunity you’ve been waiting for. You can take that LinkedIn discussion and turn it into a blog article for your website. Here’s how:

• Review the LinkedIn discussion and make sure there’s enough for an entire blog article
• Reach out to anyone who participated in the discussion and get their permission to reference them
• Write the article and reference the LinkedIn Group, the discussion, and the participants
• Publish the article, go back to the LinkedIn discussion and add a comment with the link to your article
• Thank the LinkedIn discussion participants for allowing you to use their comments in your article

4. Turn Blog Articles into Web Pages

Do you have two or three blog articles that constantly outperform the rest of your online content in terms of visits? If so, have you ever considered turning those articles into pages on your website? Depending on the topic of the article, some articles would make for great pages on a website. Here are a few examples of article topics that could be transformed into web pages:

• Tips articles
• Usage instructions
• Complimentary product or service recommendations

Many times website owners write blog articles on the topics like the ones above and those articles start to capture a lot of website traffic. It’s up to you, the website owner, to understand that these articles are highly valuable to a lot of people who visit your website. Your visitors who are not finding these articles might be better served if the articles were more prominently featured on the website. This is where turning articles into web pages come in. If you have a few articles that you want to convert into a web page, here’s how you should handle the process:

• Pick 1-2 articles that currently garner more search traffic than other articles AND that have a topic that makes sense as a web page on your website
• Create a new page on your website and paste the copy into the new page
• Go through the new page and reformat the article to look and sound more like a web page
• Test the page and hit the ‘Publish’ button

5. Create Online Videos from Blog Articles

Are you considering using more online video this year? The costs and time involved in producing professional online video have both come down dramatically from just a few years ago. It’s easier than ever before to create online video for your website and I recommend that everyone reading this article at least consider using online video is some fashion on your site.

So, you’ve decided to create more online video for your website. Great! Now, what topics should you create videos around? Good question. Like writing blog articles, many website owners struggle with coming up with topic ideas for online video. One of the best ways to solve this issue is to go back through your existing blog articles  and search for articles with topics that would make interesting (and short) online videos. Recycle and recreate those blog articles as online videos.

If you want to turn blog articles into online videos, follow the following steps:

• Search your blog for articles on topics that would make for interesting online videos
• Review each article and determine where you want to focus the attention of the video
• Cut out any unnecessary sections, as you want to keep your online videos between 30 seconds to a minute (if possible)
• Create a script from the blog article
• Prepare your video equipment and talent
• Set a date/time for the video shoot
• Record your video
• Edit your video
• Publish your video to YouTube or to your website

6. Turn One Blog Articles into a Series of Blog Articles

Do you ever find yourself writing really long blog articles? I know I do. Most of the time I feel like I have a lot to say and that everything is important. I think a lot of people are probably the same way. I’m sure that if you looked at your blog right now you might find a few different articles that fall into the “way too long” category. You’d probably find a few articles that fall into “I could have done more” category as well. Why not take advantage of this by turning one blog article into a series of blog articles?

What’s great about this strategy is that you can go back through all of your old articles and start breaking out some of the longer articles, adding some new content to each new article, and publish each of the separately. You can also go through your blog and find a bunch of articles that you can expand on. For those articles, instead of updating the existing article, simply make a blog series out of it and write one or two follow-up articles to the existing article. Here’s how you can do it:

• Make a list of all of the articles that you think you can expand on
• Come up with 1 or 2 additional topic ideas that relate to the original article
• Write the articles
• Publish one and schedule the other to go live on a future date
• Go back to the original article and add a links to parts 2 and 3 once they have gone live; this way you can drive traffic from article 1 to parts 2 and 3 as well.

7. Transform Tweets into Blog Articles

Are you using Twitter? You should be! Twitter is an excellent tool for building relationships with website visitors and prospective website visitors. It’s also great for driving traffic back to your website or blog! What I’ve found is that Twitter is a breeding ground for new content ideas. Whether it’s a tweet that I send or a tweet that I read, many times I’ll stop and think, “hmmm, I should write an article about this”. Twitter is all about information sharing and when it comes to information sharing a lot of new ideas are formed. The best way to take advantage of this is to turn tweets into blog articles. If you’re looking to do so, follow these steps:

• Review the tweet a few times and really think through if there is enough there to write an entire article on
• If it’s not your tweet that sparked the idea, reach out to the person who tweeted the information and ask him/her if you can write an article while referencing his/her tweet
• Write the article and give credit to the person who tweeted the original information
• Publish the tweet and send a link to the person who you pulled the tweet from; say thank you

Your Turn!

What are some other ways to transform old content into new content? Do you have any tips that you can share for our readers who might be suffering from writers block? If so, please share your ideas by leaving a comment below.