Green Content Marketing

June 27, 2008 on 7:38 am | In Blogs, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Junta42 | 7 Comments

Photo Courtesy of Morguefile
Hey, everyone is getting into the green movement. So, why not content marketers? When I was a reporter back in the 20th Century, we had a term for features that had a long shelf life. We called them evergreen. These were the items you could pull out again and again, season after season and re-run with only a bit of editing.

Content marketers need to get back on the green bandwagon by reusing, recycling and repurposing their content. Here are a few ways I do it.

Enewsletter to blog, blog to enewsletter. I do a monthly enewsletter called Think. Feel free to sign up. Typically, the newsletter has two fairly lengthy primary articles plus a series of briefs. All content is aimed at marketing professionals. This newsletter and my blog, THINKing (RSS feed), have discrete audiences. So, I am able to move slightly edited content back and forth between the two to reach these separate audiences.

Blog to blog. THINKing has had a surge in visitors, so I know that not everyone has seen all of the good content we have produced. Occasionally, I’ll run a feature like The Dusty Archives to showcase some of the most popular previous items.

Microblog to blog. Twitter, the microblogging service, offers another unique opportunity to repurpose content. I write short, pithy messages based on some of my recent content and post them on Twitter with a url bringing the interested back to the blog or to my Ezinearticle site for the rest of the story.

Article to white paper. If you develop a lot of content, as I do, and have been doing it for a while, you’ll build a good sized repository. So, I’ll often look through my articles to discover a theme. Once this is done, I can take several articles, string them together and Voila! I have a white paper like this media relations white paper.

White paper to blog. Once you have the white paper completed, you also can break it back down into bite-sized chunks for use on your blog.

Those are just a few Green Content Marketing ideas. How are you recycling content?

Other Posts Of Interest

  • http://www.ripplecommunications.com Jim Deitzel

    Great reminder. On one of the websites I manage, http://www.rubbermaid.com, we have lots of content. And we continue to produce new content every month. However I bet many of my visitors have never seen the old content (75% new every month).

    I need to remember to refresh the older content and keep bringing it forward.

    Someone once said to me… “what’s old to you is new to someone else”.

    This is so true with content.

    Thanks Harry!

  • http://www.my-creativeteam.com Harry Hoover

    Jim, I’ve seen your site recently, thanks to a Twitter post you did. So, you already are recycling. I’ll bet you have enough summer picnic tips to do a top 10 compilation.

  • vinnie

    At work we do quite a bit of repurposing like this, example: brochure content to web content. It works, to a point.

    I think “minimal content editing” doesn’t always fit though. In the cases you described where lots of content is being passed along the web in different formats (twitter, blog, email etc) it can work, but to go say from print to web you really should take a look at the content and how you can mold it to better fit the medium you’re transmitting on. People can tell when you’re rehashing a brochure on a website for example.

  • http://www.my-creativeteam.com Harry Hoover

    Excellent points, Vinnie. I find that I write differently based upon the venue: print or online.

  • http://joshuadelung.blogspot.com Josh

    I think this is good advice, but as some have already said, there is a difference for sure between print and online writing. As a journalist, I was always careful to avoid shovelware from the print edition to put on the Web site. At the very least, online content should be shorter, hyperlinked, and a little more visual.

  • http://www.yourprguy.com Rodger D. Johnson

    You forgot one thing. Using Digg, we can option another bloggers content to our blog. And, as you have with THINKing, invite others to be guest columnists. To be honest, you create a mountain of content — good stuff too — how do you find time to get client projects done?

  • http://www.my-creativeteam.com Harry Hoover

    Good call, Rodger. Marketing My Creative Team is the bulk of my job. That’s how I have the time.

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