Repurposing Old Blogs

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If you’ve done the work on a blog post to make it truly wonderful and timeless, the last thing you want to do is run it once and let it sit there doing nothing for the rest of eternity.  That’s where repurposing comes in.

There are several ways to repurpose blog articles.  Here are a few:

1)  Use old articles as guest blogs elsewhere.  Don’t spend all your time on guest blogs trying to come up with something new.  It is perfectly acceptable to use old blog posts as new guest blogs.  Keep in mind that the article should be timeless, so it doesn’t appear dated on the new site AND it should be older than about 6 months old.

2)  Retweet and promo old articles from your blog.  This is especially helpful if you’ve done your jump tag at the bottom correctly as your blog post will act as an extended advertisement–pulling first and then pushing your books.  Also, articles are great ways to legitimately use a diverse range of hashtags.  If you normally write romance, but you have an article about what divorce does to children, you can use the hashtag #divorce for the article, which you would obviously not use for any of your books. (We will discuss hashtags extensively later on.)

3)  Use in short story collections.  These can be either by you if you have enough articles (my books Reflections on Life I and II came from doing just this).  Or you can submit these to larger collections that do not require originals.  These types of books abound now with the success of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books.

4)  Use them as landing pages for your guest blogs.  Guest blog somewhere and then use your jump to land the person on a second article about the same topic.

5)  You can also go backwards and write guest blogs that you then post as articles to your own blog.  This works particularly well if you are not a prolific blogger.  It will give you a deadline– for someone else and thus accountability, and it can take the pressure off of creating something new for each post on your blog.  You can also link to other blog posts you’ve done such as reviews and/or interviews.

The bottom line is, don’t think “Post and Done” on your blog entries.  They should be workers out there finding you new audience members all the time.