This is going to be a good one – recycling content – my favorite way to get a blog post rolling. In fact, like most of my posts, I’m going to demonstrate the recycling of useful content to grow my audience and rank in search.

Growing My Audience is Getting Easier

Most anyone who practices content marketing has the same goal – audience growth. The first and foremost, but also the hardest way to do this is by producing unique content that no one’s seen yet. (A great viral marketing tact.) The second best way (in my opinion of course) is to recycle others’ content – creating, improving, building upon, or clarifying an intended message with that content. “Well isn’t that illegal – to copy and paste?” Sure it is – if you don’t credit copyrighted sources, which should be done regardless of copyright. I know I’d balk if someone got credit for something I did and did better because of ti without mentioning me….

In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about this specifically! The idea is to provide old resources or original sources in a new or better way – creating unique value for your audience. Especially since the release of Panda, Google has been “up all night” working on ways to detect “unique value” and reward site owners for it. In my previous post about creating unique value for readers (cited above), Eric Enge gives us a hypothetical example of what unique value is. Very simply: Unique content is not necessarily “brand new content” but any content that provides a new reason for an audience to digest it: unique value.

Rand’s WBF On Content Marketing – Recycling Content

Content Marketing Tips to Grow Blog Traffic

• Make old content your own. You can’t just copy and paste. Take an article or video, image, or other work and share your opinions, build on a view, or clarify a message.
  
• Obviously, create your own content. If it’s your blog, we want to hear from you – not what you’ve copied and pasted from another site. If you’re recycling content, use it to help you write a post, don’t make it a post. Better yet – write an entire post. On your own. Yes – I know it’s hard, but at the very least, we know it will be completely unique and of your creation. Make sure to add some thing in your post that gives it value (something new or different) to the user if you’re writing on a highly discussed topic.
• Make the content diverse and use other mediums. Many SEOs and bloggers around the world think that Google has some sort of preference to text. This is NOT the case. For the sake of your readership and your insanity – throw in some images, video as much as possible, and any other mediums you can think of. The more you have – the better. Google loves it all.

What do you think about recycling content? What are your ideas for growing a blog audience? How would you rank higher using traditional content marketing methods? Share it in the comments!!