We all know George Santayana’s ominous warning, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We could call it a kind of unintentional recycling.
Then there are of us who remember the past and are called to repeat it, with the greatest of intention and purpose. Across a twenty-year writing career, I’ve written fiction and nonfiction, history and contemporary. I’ve told tales of voyagers and settlers, of lovers, villains, and heroes, of children who grow into adults, and adults who either do or don’t grow into their dreams. I write about times gone by and the times at hand, posting and publishing across many different venues.
And I recycle quite a lot of it.
Authors today can feel virtually flogged by the drumbeat that content is king and the beast must be constantly fed. Churning out that flow of content can be both exhilarating and exhausting. So I think of my collection of content as akin to a favorite thrift store: brimming with things whose beauty, purpose, and usefulness delights new owners without regard to the object’s previous life. Blog posts return as updated “from the archive” features, newsletter features become blog posts (and vice versa). Short posts or single thoughts from larger posts get reshaped into memes, tweets, or infographics, which then get posted at diverse times of day. Graphics get updated. Narrative content gets reshaped into Q&A or tips/how-to guide format.
The idea that any content should be one-and-done makes little sense unless it’s time-specific or you’ve been paid for exclusive rights. “Repurposing content?” one skeptical colleague asked. “Isn’t that cheating?” Nope, it’s the opposite. It’s crafty (double entendre that!). The combination of yesterday’s writing plus today’s immediacy—the pace of the frenetic information cycle that blasts us each day, along with the facets of the human condition that never change—is the very argument for recycling content. Why should cats be the only ones with nine lives?
Here are ten good reasons to recycle your content:
- Content is new to anyone who hasn’t read it. You’re always gaining new readers. What you wrote a year, or three years or five years ago, is new to them.
- With nearly five billion people worldwide accessing social media, your pool of potential new readers is vast.
- Your reader segments likely don’t cross over to all your platforms, let alone to guest platforms where your work might appear. The internet is a big place!
- Readers and followers who’ve been with you for a while may not have seen the content when previously posted. Given wonky social media algorithms and the hectic nature of many of our days, it’s more likely most didn’t.
- Many people need to hear, read, or see something more than once for it to sink in. What didn’t resonate on the first read may click on a subsequent exposure.
- Readers’ needs and interests change. What wasn’t relevant to them a year ago may be urgent now.
- Readers enjoy revisiting—and sharing—enjoyable or useful reads.
- Readers and followers themselves may have a larger sharing circle than before. Their comments and shares reach a broader audience than when your piece originally posted.
- The same post with different visuals will look fresh, which invites both new and repeat reads.
- Recycling your archive can carry you, sans panic, through periods of low creative energy, burnout, vacation, illness, family emergencies, work overload.
There’s a certain joy in seeing a post that flew under the radar last year rack up the shares this year. “The wisest mind has something yet to learn”—there’s our friend Santayana again—and those with a gift for repeating the past can take a deeper measure of delight and purpose in resharing its wisdom.
Leave a Reply