Now that it’s starting to be the dog days of summer, and many of you are out on vacation (me included – I wrote this post in advance!), it can be easy to let your content slide a little bit. “Nothing is going on,” “Everyone is away,” “I’m too busy,” “I don’t feel like it” – do any of those excuses sound familiar to you?

But the warm weather is no reason to let your content slide. If you stick to your editorial calendar, not only will you continue the momentum that you’ve started this year with strong, substantive work, but you’ll also stand out in a sea of people who are letting their content slack in the summer.

But it doesn’t mean that you always have to be coming up with something new and fresh – sometimes, you can revisit some of your old content, freshen that up a little bit, and repackage it in a way that doesn’t require you to invest too much time away from the pool or the beach, but still maximizes your efforts. Let’s look at two ways you can liven up old content this summer. 

Liven It Up: Tip One – Update

There are two types of content, evergreen and timely. Evergreen content is something that is continually relevant to your audience, and so it’s always “fresh” or “evergreen.” Timely content, by contrast, is something that you’ve published as it happens, and so it’s relevant to the time period in which it’s published. But both can be updated and repurposed.

Evergreen

While the name implies that evergreen content is something that will be relevant indefinitely, there are times that you may need to update it. For example, let’s say that you put together a checklist for employers to use, and while it’s fairly comprehensive, there’s a point or two that is no longer relevant because of a change in the laws. You can update the list, and re-release it as an update. Our lawyers put together a guide for creating a business entity in their respective jurisdictions, and we re-release that as taxes are updates or various adjustments to the laws are made. Much of the guide remains the same, but there are tweaks to be made that allow us to share the information as new and fresh.

To prioritize what you’re doing here, and maximize these efforts, look at the readership of your various content – what’s most popular? Evergreen content tends to get the most views on a blog or website page, and from there, determine what your most popular items are. Start by updating those, because that is the content that your audience is most interested in, and will most want an update of.

Timely

With timely content, you have an opportunity to continue the narrative that you started with the first post, article, etc. You may already be doing this, by providing updates to legislation that’s been announced or rulings that have been made, but if you’re not, take a look at the past year of material that you have, and see where you could provide an update on the current impact of a previous piece. Was there something that you predicted would be important that turned out to have a lasting impact? Was there something that resulted in additional legislation, or has stalled? Was there something that was completely overturned or is no longer in effect that clients and potential clients may want an update on?

Again, look to your statistics to see what the most popular posts/articles were and start with those. Identify what your audience felt was the most important to them, and give them an update on that piece – remember to reference the original post/article to draw their attention back to your original content.

Liven It Up: Tip Two – Repurpose

We’ve often talked here on Zen about how no piece of content should be used only once – and by that, I mean that when you do a presentation for an industry group, you should turn that presentation into a blog post or an article, tweet select pieces of that with a link, record video of yourself sharing the key points, etc.

But in the rush of day to day work, we’re often just producing single pieces of content and using them in one channel. Which means that we have the opportunity now to repurpose them!

Look back at the last 3-6 months of content that you’ve produced, and that includes everything:

• Blog posts
• Articles
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Presentations
• LinkedIn posts

And more. Take each of those things, and identify how you can use them in a fresh new way. If you’re a regular blogger, take your 5 most popular posts, and turn them into a series of short videos that you upload to your own, or your firm’s, YouTube channel. Put them up on Instagram too with a temporary link in the profile to either your blog or the YouTube channel. Ask one of your clients or a partners to do a podcast with you, discussing the topics that you addressed in your posts. Translate the posts into more of an article format, and work with your marketing team to pitch them to the appropriate industry magazines and newspapers. Share them via LinkedIn pulse if you haven’t already.

Take your most recent presentation and turn it into a series of blog posts. Record the highlights as short videos for your YouTube channel, and share those to Instagram. Share the videos on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

The idea is to take existing work, and to re-work it a bit for a different channel, so that you have fresh content that you can share and promote. You’re not reinventing the wheel, because you already have the content, but you’re taking what you’ve previously developed and packaging it in a new way, for different audiences.

What other suggestions do you have for freshening up your content this summer? How do you repurpose your content successfully?