Whether you are writing a blog for the direct purposes of getting new subscribers and building an audience, or whether you are blogging more to advertise custom web design, or premium SEO services, or lead generation, your content is the key to expanding your exposure. Creating and uploading a consistent stream of content is important to engaging your audiences, building your credibility, and enabling you to accomplish your online goals.

Having said that, however, there is no doubt that constantly creating new content is time consuming. It is more efficient, often times, to repurpose previous blog posts (or blog post content) to drive traffic to your site. Here are some useful strategies for how to do just that.

1. Reformatting

One of the easiest ways to reuse your blogs posts is to simply redeliver them in a different format. A blog post can easily be turned into a YouTube video or a podcast simply reading the content. You can also quote your piece in social media posts that link back to the main site (which is convenient, because you can’t exactly plagiarize yourself).

2. Reposting

Simpler still, after some time has gone by you can always find reasons to repost old blog items that might still be relevant and interesting to your audience. After all, as your audience grows, it’s likely that many of your readers will not have read all of your old material. It is not a bad idea to revisit your archives from time to time. Look through your old material, find pieces that may connect to some more current issue or theme in the news or that your readers are dealing with, and put up a “throwback” post if you will. You can also update your old material as new events may call upon you to, allowing you to repost an old piece with current information rather than writing something completely from scratch. (This is particularly applicable to tutorial and instructional type pieces that will remain relevant for some time.)

There is a little bit of appeal for some readers in clicking on an old item that was apparently reposted simply because it has some special value that you expect them to benefit from. You can and should also do this on your social media pages as well to drive traffic back to your home page.

3. Hub and Spoke

“Hub and Spoke” refers to an online traffic generation method whereby you write a single, comprehensive article that you then link with smaller, updated summaries and comments in other forums, thus allowing you to keep up the interest in the original piece. This is much different from simply spamming links all over the places in the hopes that people will visit your page (that’s annoying and ineffective…mostly because it’s annoying). By actively participating in other conversations elsewhere and engaging people in your comments you manage to motivate people to click on your links while still saving yourself time. That’s what you call a win-win situation.

4. Expanding on Sub-Topics

Okay, so this one will require a little bit of extra-work, but ultimately it will save you time. For articles with enumerated points on different ways to do something (like this article) you can always isolated the individual methods in your “5 Different Ways to Make the Perfect Spaghetti” and write subsequent, full length pieces about each individual method. It requires you writing mostly new content, but the topics are right in front of you as well as the core of the information you would use to generate the piece. Naturally, it can be easier to expand your existing content then to always have to come up with something brand new.

5. Follow Ups on Hot Topics

Finally, here’s a good tip for when you have a piece that seems to be getting particularly good traction. If you have an article that’s getting viral level attention, instead of just sitting there and watching the flame go out hoping for similar luck next time, follow up on it with subsequent pieces expanding on the same topic, and maybe with interviews or comments from interesting individuals on the subject of the initial piece. If people are genuinely interested in something you’ve written, they probably would like to see more about it. At the end of the day, it’s about giving people what they are interested in while saving as much time for yourself as possible to continue building your presence on the web!