How (and Why) to Recycle Your Writing
I came of age in a blogging era that emphasized the importance of content creation. Content is king! the experts cheered. But the winds have shifted. While content remains an essential aspect of anyone’s presence online (including writers and authors), the strategy I focus on today looks nothing like the one when I first started blogging in 2008.
Back then, it was all about more.
Why publish a blog post once a week when you could post three times? (I once worked on a small editorial team that published ten blog posts per week before we changed course.) This might have made Google happy, but it was also a recipe for burnout. These days, I’m much more interested in leveraging my work in as many ways as possible before moving on.
Enter, recycling (aka, a very Essentialist approach to sharing online content).
Why Recycle Online Content?
It’s a fair amount of work to create one piece of…anything. Think about a blog post, newsletter, essay, podcast, or even a series of social media captions. It can take hours to draft and edit a piece to share online. With algorithms changing so frequently on social media, combined with average email open rates, it’s very unlikely that someone who follows you will see absolutely everything you post.
That means you’re missing out on sharing your message multiple times before moving on to the next idea, and effectively creating more work for yourself.
An Easy Way to Recycle Your Online Content
To successfully recycle your content, think about your message in two categories:
Anchor content: the original source
Supporting content: slightly altered versions inspired by the original source
Let’s go through an example and pretend you just wrote a blog post called “5 Ways to Experiment With Plot”
This is your anchor content. Now it’s time to brainstorm all the ways you can create supporting content based on the online channels you might have.
In some cases, you can simply copy and paste your post elsewhere (like on Medium or a Substack newsletter) but you can also transform your content for other channels and share it in micro-doses. For example:
Create Pinterest graphics
Host a 5-day Instagram series
Create a 5-day Facebook video series
Share with your newsletter
Record a podcast episode
If you find yourself creating less, or just want a more sustainable way to share your work with others, take some time to go back through your archives and see what you can do with them. It’s very likely you won’t have to develop anything brand new, just make adjustments to what you currently have or share it in a new way.
