Making the Most Out of Recycling Your Online Content

You have done an amazing job of writing top-quality content and your readers have reacted extremely positively to whatever you have posted for them to read. Potentially, there can be two different content phases: original content and recycled content.

Content will always be necessary to the success of your business. It is how you communicate on every possible level with other people. Great ideas are essential to your success but, at the same time, you need the words to execute the ideas that you have created. Of course, you are an extremely busy person and you may think that you couldn’t possibly spare the time time to write content. After all, content writing isn’t usually something you can merely spit onto the page. It probably requires a lot of thought and a lot of personal effort. Additionally, you need new content all of the time. It will never be enough for you to write one or two articles and leave it at that. You will need to post new, fresh content on a regular basis and keep posting fresh content on a regular basis. If you need to write all of that new content, when will you have any time to do any of your other work? Well, that is where the recycled content comes into play.

Recycling different types of content

There are many different types of content that you can recycle. There is content that you wrote once upon a time. There is also content that other people have written and, as long as you attribute the content to the correct person, you will absolutely be allowed to use it. There will be some editing involved and very possibly some rewriting; however, you won’t need to reinvent the wheel every time  you wish to post content on your website or blog. Using recycled content can be an important part of your content strategy and not only will it save you time and effort but it will also save you money, which is always a good thing. You can collect content from a bunch of different places, some of which may be obvious to you and some that you may not have thought of before.

Content from and offline source

You should start with your own materials. Over time, you probably accumulated a great deal of content (online as well as print materials) that you can easily recycle and most likely the content has a lot of value, provided that it is not dated material. Even if you aren’t able to use it in its original form, with a little bit of revising and tweaking,  you can probably use it and feel satisfied that you have given it a fresh twist that will appeal to your readers. It may be as simple as plugging in new sales statistics to your sales materials, for example. Another possibility is a promotional video that your public relations department uses. It may take a small amount of tweaking but it will undoubtedly be useful for you and your new purposes.

Clients

Undoubtedly, you have had a great deal of interaction with your clients over the years and there is a wealth of material there that will be extremely useful for your business. Testimonials are excellent forms of communication to use as recycled material. They are always positive and they will never go out of date. You may not realize  yet how helpful your clients can be when it comes to making the best use of recycled materials. Of course, you need to make sure that either you or someone you trust reviews all of the materials before you actually use it. Of course, that applies to all materials in all businesses.

Customer service

Your customer service department has the most direct relationship with your clients. Because of that, they have tremendous capacity to help you with content. Because they have developed relationships with your clients, they have a deep understanding of what they need and want and what you need to do to keep them satisfied. It is a great idea to take interactions that your clients have had with your customer services department and turn it into a Question-and-Answer document, which you can include in your recycled content.

A repository of archived content

You should take a good look at what you have in the way of potentially recyclable materials and create a repository so that you can draw from it as you need the content.  You can organize it in a way that makes sense and is easy to gather as you need it. You will be surprised at how much valuable information you have at your disposal.

Conclusion

You have a wealth of content and tremendous capability of wowing your readers with new and recycled content. You can use newsletters that you have written previously, blog articles, white papers, and other written materials. If they had merit the first time around, they will be just as interesting the second time around. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you should be recycling older content exclusively. You need to offer both new and recycled content in correct proportions. It just takes a little bit of creativity, ingenuity, and hard work and it will help you to bring your business success to the next level.

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