Struggling for new content? Look to old content for inspiration

by Joe Kuzma ( joe_kuzma) on October 16, 2018

We’ve all been there: writer’s block. You lack the drive or creativity to come up with new content and then obsess over not having something new for your audience.

“Oh no, they’ll stop following me” or “I’ll lose progress” are often the thoughts which come from stressing out over supplying new content to your readers or listeners. This type of anxiety isn’t all too uncommon among creative types and entrepreneurs, especially if content creation is secondary to running a business or other priorities in your life.

Furthermore, if this is something you’ve been doing for any length of time, you may already have a nice stockpile of content you’ve already published: it’s there you should look for inspiration.

Repurposing Old Content

If you’re in a line of work where information may change or expire, it’s well worth your time to look back on something you may have posted months ago or even years ago, and then using that as the source of a new piece of content.

Even if the information hasn’t changed, a rewrite to freshen information that’s still relevant easily gives you something “new” to share with your audience. You can also feel free to copy and paste some of the lines you’ve already used, especially quotes and sources, in the new blog post.

Chances are your followers may recognize some of what you wrote if they’ve followed you for a while, but a revision will still appear as new material.

Those who started following you after your blog was posted may have never seen the original item, which means this is brand-new in their eyes…

Reposting Old Content

If time is your enemy, you can still take your old content and repurpose it: but this time only for social media.

Chances are you may have only promoted your article once, maybe twice, on social media around the initial time that you published it. If that was months ago, you can now come around and simply share it again.

The concept is the same: it looks new to those who are new to you or your brand.

However, if your content was posted a week ago, you’ll want to be careful not to spam your followers. They may think you only have this one item. (We all know those commercials that run over and over… and over. Don’t be like those!)

What’s old is new again

Hopefully this was a valuable lesson in how to reuse things that worked for you in the past to help you achieve your goals in the future. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with reusing content, but just be careful that you don’t use this as a crutch. That is, you still need to mix in new ideas or else you will suffer from appearing unoriginal.

However, when you are struggling for something new, it never hurts to revisit old content to bridge the gap. As the old adage goes, what’s old is new again!