By now we’ve all heard the endless chatter about Google’s issues with duplicate content. In the past, we could easily re-run pieces in a variety of places. Some experts I know reused articles as many as twenty times, but if you do that now you may find your site in a lot of trouble and severely penalized by the Google-Gods.

So what’s a marketer to do? I was considering this the other day when I was trying to figure out what to blog about because the other issue is that Google does not want “thin” content, which is content that isn’t compelling, thin in data or light in information. Basically they don’t want people just throwing stuff on their blog to get traffic.

We’re all in a creative industry but that does not necessarily mean that we are an endless font of creative ideas. Then I thought: instead of coming up with new ideas, I wonder how many times I can reuse old ones in a way that won’t get us into trouble.

So here are my five favorites, a variety of different things you can do with the same piece of content.

For my complete list of 20 ways to reuse, recycle and repurpose content check out my article in HuffPo here.

Now I’m not suggesting that you do this with each and every blog post, but if you have ideas or posts that seem to have legs (and we all know that not all of them will) then maybe it’s time to see how far you can stretch them.

20 Ways To Reuse, Recycle and Repurpose Content – TOP FIVE 

–  Update Past Posts with Industry Updates – At some point, even the best and most creative posts need to be updated. Now’s the time to go through your old posts and see what can be updated and reused. Pull in new content and add a fresh take, your readers will love it.

–  Pull Blog Content into an Infographic – Combine several of your text-based posts into more visual content – such as an aggregated infographic or chart.

–  Tips – Create a tips list from a blog post you did and then create images from it to use on Pinterest, in Twitter, on Instagram, etc. We did this for our 52 Ways to Sell More Books.

–  Quizzes – People love quizzes, when we did ours on “Which Social Media Site is Right for You” people just ate it up. Most of the time it’s just grabbing existing content you’ve done, but it’s a fantastic way to repurpose your stuff.

–  Turn content into trading cards or other swag: I had trading cards made for my book, How to Sell Your Books By The Truckload on Amazon. I pulled different tips I had already written, and put one tip per card. I took these around to speaking events and mail them with everything. People love them.

It’s important that you get as much mileage out of what you write as you possibly can, and with all of the new places to post (Pinterest, Instagram, Vine, etc.) it’s become easier than ever to create virtual “breadcrumbs” that lead readers back to your website which, in the end, is the ultimate goal.

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