One of the most challenging aspects of content marketing is simply coming up with new things to say

It’s easier with some industries than others. In the world of technology where exciting new things are happening every single day, it might be easy to create new content day in and day out. But what about very niche fields where you feel like you’ve already said all there is to say one month into launching your content marketing campaign? That’s where many re-purpose content..

The lifespan of content posted online is extremely short.

A day after a new post on Facebook and it won’t be showing up in anyone’s feeds. The blog you painstakingly crafted will be forgotten as soon as you publish the next one. The same goes for podcasts and Youtube videos. There’s an initial splash when your subscribers all view or read your newest content, and then it fades. The internet works at break neck speed, so there’s nothing wrong with reusing it with a few changes.

Here are a few ways to do it.

Break larger content into smaller pieces

Content marketing comes in long form and short form. If you’ve previously published a white paper or longer blog article that generated a positive response, you can break it into several smaller pieces and republish them as short-form articles or social media posts.

If you feel bad about taking old content and reusing it word-for word, you can go back through and change up the wording a bit but the creative effort is minimal as you’re primarily going off what you’ve already written. The good thing about this method is that one single piece of content can be used to create several more.

Switch up formats

In addition to switching up content length, you can change up the format altogether.

• You can take the text from a blog article and make it the transcript for your next Youtube video.
• A blog article or white paper that was heavy on statistics can be turned into interest infographics.
• A podcast transcript can be turned into a guest blog post.
• Switch from audio to video or text, or from text to video or audio, and from video to audio or text sll of it is fair game.

Do a follow up piece

Another great way to revisit old content is to do a follow up piece about it. This works especially good with prediction articles. If you started of the year with making some predictions for the coming year, you can close out the year by looking at what you got right and what you got wrong.

You can also do anniversary write-ups where you go back to something you posted exactly one, two, or three years ago and build upon it.

Not only does this create new content, it can revitalize interest in old content if you link back to it in your new content.

Experiment with micro-content

Micro-content is just what the name implies. It’s extremely short content. It’s a relatively new direction in content marketing.

Micro-content involves using short-form channels like SMS, Twitter, and social media to share one- or two-sentence pieces of content.

Again, these can be recycled from old, longer pieces you’ve done in the past. Micro content is a great way to switch things up with your SMS and social media marketing efforts since it’s a way to give value to followers and subscribers in the form of something besides a coupon or flash sale.