Here at Hatchbuck, we love social media. We’re always looking for informative, interesting content to share with our audience. Over the years, it’s become clear to us that some posts just keep getting more love than the rest. These are just a few of our most popular subjects on social:

  1. This actionable guide to getting started on social
  2. 17 killer tools that will save you time and energy on social media
  3. Our five favorite non–Taco Bell brands dominating the social sphere

We could go on! But we won’t. Because—well, let’s back up a second.

You see what we just did there?

We turned three old posts into a new one. In this case, we created a (truncated) listicle roundup of some of our most popular posts related to social media. We know the content is still good because the posts are good and genuinely popular.

We just repurposed three old posts—and maybe even got a few more clicks. More clicks mean more engagement, more opportunities for sharing, more chances to delight and inform readers.

Repurposing old content is an ideal way to maximize your time and money. It’s a found resource—you don’t need to invest more time in coming up with new content and hoping it makes a splash within its week-long lifecycle. If you’re not doing it, you should be.

Here are some ways to make it work:

Make a listicle.

You saw what we did above—find a theme and run with it. It could be a roundup of your year’s most popular posts, a timely listicle (National Dessert Day? “Here are our top 10 dessert recipes”) or just a random post to create more content.

Make an infographic.

Some information is best told in words. But sometimes words just aren’t clear enough—you need a map, a visualization or a graph to show how that information moves.

For example, if you wrote a blog post detailing the differences between Millennials and Generation X in the workplace, it could be interesting. But you’d be remiss to not repurpose that information into a visualization, like this infographic from Inc:

 

repurpose old content

 

Infographics are powerful tools—and shareable to boot.

Compile your content into a downloadable e-book.

Maybe you’ve written a hundred posts on your blog, www.howtosavemoneyonairfare.com. It’s filled with great tips on how to save when flying. That’s perfect preparation for an e-book on the subject. Your blog is suddenly inbound content marketing for your book, which is a more convenient way to sell your tips to eager readers.

If you want to simply grow your numbers as an influencer, making the e-book a free download is a great way to collect emails. If you’re more interested in immediate monetization, you could sell it for a few bucks on Amazon. Either way, you should add in a few extra tips not available on your blog and update old posts to ensure the content is still worthwhile for your readers and uniquely valuable.

Establish an editorial calendar.

You don’t want your content to disappear into internet noise. There are a few easy ways you can leverage each post, but the most common method (and best way to structure everything) is to start with a strong editorial calendar that reminds you exactly when the best times to repurpose your content are. Holidays, anniversaries, industry leaders’ birthdays, product launches and company milestones are all great opportunities to repurpose relevant content.

What’s nice about this is you don’t have to schedule it on the fly. You can use a social scheduling software to prepare posts relevant to each day far in advance, easing your workload and how much you need to stay on top of social every day.

You can jump the gun shortly after your content comes out, too, and simply remind people to read certain articles at various times in a week. “ICYMI” posts and roundup emails are an easy way to grab your fans’ attentions and point out the great work you’re doing—in case they missed it.

Offer your best as a guest.

If you have an article that would work well for another blog, try emailing that blog owner and offer it up as a free guest post. This is a common tactic—you’ll often see the line, “This blog was originally published on www.someonesblog.com.”

This is generally a pretty seamless exchange. You get sweet backlink referral traffic, they get free content, and your post gets a wider audience. You’ll have already published it on your website for social and SEO strength, so all this does it add referral traffic, too.

Not all blogs do this, but many do. It requires a good amount of research into places that might be a good fit—don’t just settle for a spray-and-pray method.

To repurpose your content optimally, think ahead.