All freelancers who write not just for pleasure but to pay the bills as well have learned one important skill and have successfully put it to work: repurposing content. There is absolutely no shame in recycling your material, as long as (1) you own the copyright (i.e. you haven’t sold all rights to a magazine or written as work-made-for-hire for a client) and (2) you invest a bit of time in making substantive changes.
Say you are a blogger. Where else do you write for publication? Your blog posts could be recycled into articles for your or a client’s website, print newsletter, e-newsletter, press release, e-book, workshop lesson plan, etc.
Use one or more of these techniques to freshen up your original article each time you use it elsewhere.
Change the angle. If you emphasized one particular element of the story, emphasize a new one now. If you told the story from one person’s perspective, tell it from the perspective of someone else in the story.
Change the person. If you wrote the article in third person (“She walked away . . .”), change the article to a first-person account (“I walked away . . .”). You’ll need to ensure that the person telling the story approves the new version told from her point of view.
Make it shorter. Cut out some of the extra details and focus in on just one key point or message.
Make it longer. Add in some additional material from your original research or interview notes.
Rewrite the lead paragraph. Start the article in a new way.
Turn it into a how-to article. What did the story’s participants learn and can that be shared with others? Turn those lessons into a how-to or step-by-step article for others.
Get the most out of the time you spend researching and writing articles by using that material in many different ways.
Need an example? This article is repurposed from one I just wrote on my other blog, Nonprofit Communications. That version emphasizes how nonprofits can recycle their best stories to market their organizations in different ways. To recycle that post for this blog, I pulled out one of the four steps from that article, changed some of the wording to address freelance writers instead of nonprofits, and added a new title and lead paragraph. I spent nearly an hour drafting the first post, but only ten minutes on this one. See how well this can work?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Some useful tips. Nowadays you can get software that will ‘re-jig’ your blog or article, making it reuseable more quickly than before.
One thing I would mention is the ‘padding out’ of articles.
As an article directory owner, I see a great many articles that have too much repetition. It is better to have a shorter, concise article, than a long, drawn out article with little content value.
You don’t even need to own the copyright. You can’t copyright ideas – only words. For instance, you can’t copyright recipes, only what you say about the recipe.
That means that you can take anybody’s article and rewrite it in your own words. Of course any self-respecting author will soon be adding his own input, and often there is little relationship to the original article. But the seed idea came from the original article.