3 Easy Ways Stretch the Shelf-Life of Your Content

Content marketers are often burdened with the task of having to create quality, relevant content on a consistent basis. Once you hit publish, you move on to the next content piece that can capture your audience. At times, it can feel as though you are strapped for content and in desperate need of relevancy and quality. Creating new ways to utilize existing content material can take away some of the pressure of having to constantly create content from scratch all the time. Here are few tips to help you do more with your existing content.

Tweet a Content Topic over a 3-6 month period

Twitter moves at rapid-fire speed, and if you are tweeting your topic just once, you are not taking full advantage of your possible social media reach on Twitter. Each article or blog piece can be tweeted at least 10 times over a 3-6 month period. The trick to not making your tweets look the same is to, pull various quotes from your post or find news ways to paraphrase messages. This approach while allowing you to reach a wider audience, can also serve as a way to test different messages.

For instance, for this post, I can pull about 5 different messages for Twitter that I can schedule out over a 3-6 month period such as:

• 3 Easy Ways Stretch the Shelf-Life of Your Content
• How to Stretch the Shelf-life of Your Content
• Use These 3 Easy Steps to Improve Your Content Marketing Strategies
• How Tweeting Can Help You Stretch The Shelf-life of Your Content
• How do you improve the mileage on your content initiatives?

Note that, I used different formats including, a question, “how to”, and action phrases. The goal is to test out multiple messages to find out what my audience responds best to, while expanding my reach.

Create derivative Blog Posts That Link Back to Your Original Article

Thinking about link building strategies to improve your SEO and overall user engagement? Why not start with your blog posts? Since it may not be a good idea to create one article that is reused continuously, you can take the approach of creating derivative blog posts. These derivative and main blog post ideas can come from your overall SEO strategy.

For example, if my goal is to rank for the keyword phrase, “Digital Marketing Strategies” my derivative blog posts could include:

• What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
• Top 2015 Digital Marketing Strategies
• Digital Marketing Strategies that Increase Sales
• How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy for Your Business
• Creating a Plan for a New Digital Marketing Strategy…and so on.

As you may have noticed, all these blog posts can be linked to each other. And the best part is, this linking strategy can be through internal and external platforms. In my blog post I can use anchor texts that link to related blog posts, and I can even list these articles in a read more section.

Create Downloadable Material from Your Existing Blogs

Usually, I like to approach lead generating content marketing initiatives, by creating blog content centered on a downloadable piece. However you can take the opposite approach by creating downloadable pieces such as eBooks, whitepapers, infographics and even educational videos with existing blog posts. To do this, you will have to find blog posts that have common themes that can be used as starting grounds for other downloadable content pieces.

Finding creative ways to reuse existing content can help you make the most out every content. And in the process of trying to gain more mileage out of your existing content, you might be pleasantly surprised to find yourself attracting a more targeted audience as you build upon existing content foundation blocks.