15 Content Recycling Strategies to Extend Your Impact

Whether you’re a teacher blogger, a district or university CIO, a or an EdTech executive you should be creating and sharing great content to build your brand and extend your impact.

Let’s start with five content creation gems:

• Five Tips. Build on an idea that deserves more attention. Add five “must-knows” behind an idea to beef up an argument or perspective (e.g., 5 Best Practices For Reimagining Professional Learning This Year).

• 10 Strategies. Practicality is everything. Readers are drawn to blogs because they provide tangible strategies that they hope to use immediately. Take an idea, list 10 ways that your audience can immediately take and apply in their day-to-day (e.g., 10 Powerful Project-Based Learning Engagement Strategies).

• Tell a Story. Storytelling the most effective way to engage an audience, sustain their attention and move them to act. Have a stale blog topic? Add a personal story that shares a value that connects to content, and closes with a call to action.

• New Hook. Self styled “intrigue expert” Sam Horn shares a tried and true method to landing the attention of your audience: ask three “did you know” questions that your audience doesn’t know. Next share answers to these questions using the word “imagine” because deploying this word pulls people out of their preoccupation. Then link the word “imagine” to aspects that are unique to your topic, solution or point of view.

• Create Evergreen Content. Evergreen content is SEO friendly content that continues to be relevant long past the day you actually publish it. This means avoiding statistics or current trends that you know will change quickly. Stick to top tips, reviews or “how to” tutorials that people will probably still be searching for in the future.

You don’t need to stop at posting. A great nugget of content may start as a blog but that doesn’t have to be the end. Here are 15 content recycling tips to extend your impact:

1. Post a blog. Having a central location to drive traffic to is vital. Use a blog post to thoroughly explore the topic. Make this a collaborative exercise and invite multiple staff to contribute. Track your traffic to learn what’s working, and what’s not.

2. Tweet a summary. After a tweet use a social media management tool (we use Hootsuite) to schedule several different versions of the tweet at different times of day for several weeks into the future. That way your tweet has a better chance of being seen in your followers’ news feeds, which fill up quickly with the constant activity on Twitter.

3. Create a newsletter. Not everyone can make it to your blog every day, so bring the blog to them. Highlight a few of your most shared stories as well as those that could use a little attention. Include links in each to the actual content and you can also start driving more traffic to your website. Here’s an example in our weekly email newsletter, Smart Update.

4. Create an infographic. Don’t have photoshop? No problem. There are several cheaper options that don’t require opening up your wallet. Try GIMP, it’s free and there are several tutorials online. There are a couple infographic creation tools available as well, try Venngage or Piktochart.

5. Post image on Pinterest. Take your graphic and share it on this graphic heavy platform that’s primed for images that drive people to your blog post. Getting Smart Advocacy Partner, MIND Research has been having a lot of fun with images lately in their Off The Number Line math cartoon series.

6. Record a podcast. Go low-fi and use the built-in microphone in your smartphone to record a discussion.

7. Blog the podcast. Produce another blog where the podcast is embedded, and summarized (e.g., listen to a conversation about talent). Now repeat step two.

8. Post on Facebook. Upload your graphic that you produced in step three to Facebook with supporting commentary and link that takes people to your blog post.

9. Post it on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn’s Pulse platform, publish your blog post. Don’t forget to mention and link your original blog post.

10. Post it on Medium. Longform Rookie MVP for the couple years is Medium. Create an account using your Twitter account, and publish your blog post. Again, don’t forget to mention and link your original blog post.

11. Guest post. Use the infographic with short intro as guest post on a blog with a lot of traction.

12. Collect and post responses. If your post inspired powerful comments, collect the feedback and share as follow up blog. Here is an example of a response written by Getting Smart’s Bonnie Lathram inspired by a post of Tom’s. You may even want to seek out individuals for a more structured and long form blog response.

13. Repost. Use the blog to share updates and provide some thought leadership. In this example from Instructure, we grabbed a blog promoting a paper and added a comment.

14. Slideshare. If you’ve ever used PowerPoint then you can definitely use SlideShare. Re-purposing a blog post into a SlideShare presentation can help you reach an entirely new audience. SlideShare can be embedded on other websites, making it easy for others to share. In addition, SlideShare and Haiku have partnered to provide users a way to make beautiful presentations online. Check it out here.

15. Recycle. Have a favorite post from the past, or one that was a fan favorite? Give it a makeover with updated information or connect it to the news/trends of the day.

Seem daunting? Doesn’t have to be. Find out where your target audience is and focus on those channels.

Want help? As a learning design firm, Getting Smart Services provide strategic design, growth services, knowledge design and learner experiences for companies and organizations looking to expand reach and amplify impact. Let our team help you develop, restructure, or refocus your blog. Want to chat? Email [email protected].

For more, check out:

• Blogging is Alive and Well for Leaders, Learners and Lead Generators
• Blogging Now, Communicating for the Future
• Encourage Writing with a Domain, Blog & Portfolio