Reuse of Existing Material

When you have over 3000 different articles written sometimes, you wonder what you can do, especially when they span 20 years. Reuse, recycle, and rewrite are the terms to remember here.

The simple thing to do is leave them there and hope Google and other Search engines keep finding them interesting, but that does not happen very often.

You can attempt to rewrite them and keep them current, and I have done that in many cases. However, that is time-consuming and prone to other issues.

Currently, my methodology is typically the following:

1. Every day I ensure I have at least one article queued (using Buffer a very useful utility) to be pushed out to Social Media. Usually this post has been edit’ed or rewritten to ensure it is readable, and fits with my Yoast SEO tools as well.
   • The Yoast tool forces a much more rigid SEO model so that makes the article more likely to be found or re-indexed by search engines. Now I am also using Rankmath and Grammarly to reuse content as well.
   • Occasionally I find articles that are really unusable, I do delete those, but Yoast allows me to redirect the old URL to another article.
2. There are some Social Media outlets that don’t work with Buffer, so I tend to add the articles on the day of re-publish to Tumblr and Flipboard as well.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

I have altered my Theme to show the “date of update” at the start of the article to show that this is still updated material. The original publish date is still in the URL and at the end of the article, so there is a slight deception there. Note I have done that with this blog as well.

I tried another idea that I thought was clever, but it ended up biting me. WordPress allows the author to make an article sticky, which makes it stay on the front page. This method caused things to remain stuck, and it took me a great deal of fiddling around and finally getting a consultant to clean this mess up. I will investigate this further to see if this is still a viable idea to help recycle older material.

The other option I have is to write follow-up stories to the original stories and hope to create some heat for the original material. Reuse of material is an important aspect of writing.