10 great ways to repurpose your old blog content

Curation and crowd-sourcing in action! Today I’m summarizing 10 of the most actionable and creative answers to the following question:

Blogs are not vacuums. Each post, after circulation and promotion, after initial discussion, still exists and adds value. But how can we take a blog post and use this content in some other way after it has been posted? I am speaking here of ideas like converting to PowerPoint presentations and posting them to SlideShare, etc. Your ideas? Thanks!

Repurpose away!

Tips from Michael Maine:

1. “Best of”: Create special tabs, lists or pages for posts based on popularity, subject matter or number of Tweets, Facebook shares/Likes, etc.

2. Print pieces: Collect similarly themed content, and print booklets for distribution at trade shows, conferences and networking events.

3. Supplements: If you have a YouTube video, Sribd upload or Slideshare deck on the subject, link to a corresponding blog post.

Tips from Gregor McKelvie:

4. Dig & link: Before you write a new post, review some of what you’ve written previously on similar topics and selectively link to related work.

5. Footer recommendations: After each post, collect links to related previous content. Several WordPress plugins can generate these recommendations automatically.

6. Internal resource: Your colleagues should know that your company’s blog is a content source that can inform their presentations, reports and other work projects.

Tips from Yvon Bayonne:

7. Mash it up: Pull in content from multiple channels onto one page per subject. A page about word of mouth marketing, for instance, would have all applicable tweets from your company, blog posts, public slide decks, pod casts and white papers featured.

8. Manifesto!: Extract themes and learning from your previous work, and summarize into prediction pieces, opinion posts and year-in-review spots. Link back to the original posts.

Tip from Shiri Gamon:

9. Newsletters: Showcase relevant posts within your recurring newsletter, with a focus on digging deep into your archive to get new eyes on old content.

Tip from Matt Kammerait:

10. Shareable bits: Gather interesting factoids and points from older work, and tweet it out (or share via Facebook and LinkedIn) with a link. This is a great way to break a longer post down into pieces that are perfect for social sharing.

How do you repurpose your blog's older content? Please share your ideas in the comments.