Recycling Content the Smart Way

Content-based online marketing requires a constant supply of new information, both on your own web site and elsewhere. Before long you'll quickly find yourself running out of ideas. The trouble is, your content can only provide SEO benefits if it's unique. The need for new and unique content also impacts on the strategy I call SEO's virtuous circle.

This challenge is faced by every web site owner, because it's simply not possible to dream up half a dozen new ideas every day. And if you submit the same content to multiple sites, Google won't provide SEO benefits (it may even actively punish you).

At first glance, it seems as if recycling content is impossible. If Google sets out to punish duplicate content, what can you do? As it happens, quite a lot. Naturally, there's more work involved. Fortunately, this additional work is spread out over time.

For an example of a way to recycle content, take a look at this forum post. As you can see, it contains a detailed explanation of how to recycle content on the web. It explains how to recycle the same content over and over again.

It makes it possible for web marketing people to maximise the SEO benefits they get from the same content over a period of several months. If you haven't read the post yet, click the link and take a look at it now (it provides useful 'how to' information designed to correspond to this article).

The important thing to note about the above forum post, is that it's an example of exactly the point I'm making. It recycles the content of this article, using a 3rd party forum to enhance the conversation already in play on that forum. I've linked to it from this article, thus recycling existing work. That forum post inspired this article, and both that post and this article will inspire a blog entry tomorrow. All 3 will appear as tweets on my Twitter page. They'll also show up as links on my Delicious page.

You can take the whole concept even further than described in my forum post. I use this strategy in my own SEO content creation for clients. I'm typically dealing with 10-20 different topics at the same time (i.e. 10-20 clients), recycling content in the manner described.

Without recycling, I'd struggle to find enough new things to write about (especially for topics I know little about, and have to research). This is the benefit that recycling content offers you.