Writing articles on your blog, sites like medium.com or guest posts on other blogging platforms is important to get more traffic to your website. However, writing can be time-consuming and you may not be able to write new stuff every week. So how can we solve this problem? The answer: by recycling old content, over and over again. Popular Twitter accounts with 100k+ of followers keep their audience engaged on auto-pilot and with recycled material. Instead of gaining value from a blogpost once, they recycle it to extend its lifetime.

Here are 8 ways to recycle your content and extend its lifetime in order to get more traffic with less work.



1. Keep sharing your old content

Timelines on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks are constantly in motion. They push your content further down in a relatively small time-frame. The trick is to repost your content on different times to get more people to read it, share it, and ultimately get more traffic.

Pro tip: experiment with different posts, linking to the same article.

2. Link to older posts from newer ones.

Linking to relevant, archived posts from new posts can drive traffic to those older posts. In addition, those links will improve the SEO of the original post as well.

Pro tip: You might want to consider replacing the old images with some fresh new ones. You may also want to remove the date from the post, since readers are less likely to share it if they see your post is too old.

3. Turn old blog content into relevant quote tweets

Quotes are short and valuable easy-to-apply tips that can be spread widely in the social community. With proper branding, posting quotes on Twitter would be an effective way to drive visitors to your target page. You can pull a quote out of an old blog post, or just find some online.

Here’s an example of how we use quotes:



“Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.” – @richardbranson pic.twitter.com/t17eki8Sv2 — TweetFavy (@TweetFavy) 6 april 2015





Pro tip: Did you know that almost 30% of all retweets are quote-related? You can find all the quotes we’ve shared on Twitter with their (unbranded) images in this post. Feel free to share them with your followers! (See how I just used technique #2 here?).

4. Turn blog content into an infographic

Infographics are the perfect way to turn a data-heavy blog post into a highly shareable piece of visually attractive content. They’re also a great way to attract links and traffic: according to AnsonAlex, businesses that publish infographics grow their traffic an average of 12% more than those that don’t.

You can create your own infographics if you have some graphic design experience, but even if you’re not a graphic designer, you can use a tool like Piktochart to do it for free (HubSpot has some great free infographic templates as well). Alternatively you can hire a freelance designer on Envato, Freelancer, Odesk, or use a site like Fiverr.

After you have your infographic, you can submit it to any of the following directories:

Reddit Infographics (Free submission)

Nerdgraph (Free submission)

Submit Infographics (Free submission)

Infographic Site (Free submission)

Infographics archive (Paid submission, starting at $14.97)

Infographiclove (Paid submission, $75,-)

Pro tip: Don’t forget to feature it on your blog and make sure to include an embed code so people can easily share the infographic on their sites.

5. Turn multiple blogposts into an eBook

If you have specific expertise to share, then an eBook is the way to go. You can turn a series of blog posts into an ebook to make it easier for people to get all of the amazing content in the series in a single place. Similarly, you can go through your blog archives and look for articles that could be put together to create a cohesive eBook that teaches or explains a complete topic.

Pro tip: eBooks are a great a great asset when it comes to list building. Consider giving them away for free in return for an email newsletter signup.

6. Add a ‘Top Posts’ section to your blog

Many popular blogs use this technique to recycle popular older content on their website. They add their popular posts on the top of their page and link to it from different places. Instead of hoping that visitors scroll back to previous pages, help them out and put your popular posts on the front page, permanently.

7. Post summaries

An other great way of recycling content is writing a short summary with the main points of your previous post. At the end of the summary link to the full post and you have a semi-new-post that you can share on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and other places where your audience might be walking around.

8. Email digests

At the end of the week or month, send out out emails to your prospects with a digest of previous posts published in said period. Recycle your content by putting them in a bundle and send them via email to your list of prospects.

Conclusion

Write blogposts. Create valuable content. It’s key to grow your business early on. Recycling that content later on can help you get more out of the time and effort you put into creating this content. Instead of getting traffic from your content once, you can recycle it over the course of weeks and months.

Do you have any other techniques or tips?

How do you drive traffic to your archived posts? Is there something I’ve forgotten? Let me know in the comments below!